In 1995 Terry Farrell & Partners won a limited competition to adapt an early 19th Century orphanage in Edinburgh to accommodate a gallery for the work of Eduardo Paolozzi and a new headquarters for the National Galleries of Scotland The project ran from 1995-1999. The original Grade 1 Neo-classical building was designed by Thomas Hamilton and completed in 1833. Farrell’s scheme proposed that office spaces be accommodated in the wings with the Baroque towers, the piano nobile (first floor of principal rooms), and top floor given over to the principal gallery spaces. The scheme recommended that the original interiors be restored and, apart from new services, building interventions kept to a minimum. The gallery was opened in 1999, opposite its sister gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. In 2011 the buildings were renamed Modern Art Two and Modern Art One respectively.

Farrell’s approach was to ‘immerse himself in the spirit of the period’, drawing on Soane and his museum as a ‘fitting connection for a building that relishes its domestic scale and seeks to reject the cleanliness of a conventional contemporary art gallery’. The main intervention was to remove a small section of floor to create a double height space at the centre of the building on an axis with the entrance, forming a ‘great hall’. An upper level gallery through this space joined together the formerly unconnected wings. The ground floor corridor, blocked off during late Victorian alterations was reinstated as the heart of the new public space.

There was also an expansion of the project to include the landscape of the new gallery, that of the adjacent Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and other local landscape amenities. It was Terry Farrell’s proposal to locate a Landform in the northern part of the lawn of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and Charles Jencks, having completed two Landforms at his home in Dumfries, was invited to create a design for this in collaboration with Terry Farrell and Partners. The opening of the Landform took place on 1 August 2002.

Construction Partners:
Engineering Consultants: Will Rudd Associates
Building Consultants: Thomas and Adamson
Main Contractor: Hall and Towse Scotland