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ALLAN MURRAY DESIGN JOHN GLENDAY
I DEAS
MAN
THE OPENING OF THE ST JAMES QUARTER IS A BIG MOMENT FOR EDINBURGH BUT ALSO NEATLY SUMS UP THE SUCCESS OF ONE PRACTICE, ALLAN MURRAY ARCHITECTS, IN RESHAPING THE CITY. NOW, WITH ITS CREATIVE FORCE AND FIGUREHEAD DEPARTING FOR ALLAN MURRAY DESIGN WE ASK HOW A MORE EXPLORATIVE IDEAS BASED PRACTICE CAN FRAME FUTURE URBAN PLACEMAKING.
“I’m not retiring!” declares a visibly frustrated Allan Murray as he seeks to scotch recent reports of his departure from the architecture scene. Indeed, far from putting his feet up and hitting the golf course Murray is more enthusiastic than ever about the power of ideas to drive change and has established a brand new practice, Allan Murray Design, to achieve just that. Over recent decades no architect has come close to reshaping central Edinburgh to the degree that Murray has, overseeing large scale urban renewal projects from the newly opened St James Centre to New Waverley. His lesser works, such as the Royal Mile hotel, have achieved what others deemed impossible by assembling large tracts of land in the city’s World Heritage heart and driving his schemes through a notoriously fickle planning process. With all eyes on St James however Murray has taken this moment to draw a line under his long association with the practice he founded in 1992, by launching a new design-led firm called Allan Murray Design. Since transferring possession to an employee ownership trust at the start of the year Allan Murray Architects has been run by managing director Connor Pitman with Murray no URBAN REALM SUMMER 2021 URBANREALM.COM
longer playing any role in the company that still bears his name. He said: “A clean break was the right thing to do. It’s much more exciting than having to worry whether I create another £20m project. “It’s a good natural ending with St James. This is the most exciting and fun project I’ve ever done but I’m interested in lots of different scales. I was working on a tiny little project in Somerset the other week. You might think ‘what are you doing here Allan? But it was in a sensitive historic site where you have to exercise your brain. That’s why I’m there, to be thoughtful. I’m not saying I didn’t do that at St James, I did. But it’s on a different scale.” St James is the largest of a series of transformative projects reshaping the face of the Scottish capital, a mission in which Murray has invested 16 years of his life, but how has one man come to make the city his canvas? “It’s not a rich uncle, it’s the power of an idea”, Murray says. Guiding Urban Realm to the former Eastern Scottish bus depot in New Street, he continued: “We were asked by clients to look at the bus station. It was a horrible building. That was a problem but it was not the problem. The problem was we don’t connect to the city and integrate >
