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Supporting Scottish designers? How about just supporting good designers full stop. I for one would assume it is a source of pride to many parochial Scots (designers and artists included) that there are 2 Zaha Hadid buildings in Scotland whilst there are none in England; 1 Frank Gehry Building in Scotland versus none in England. And as for the Parliament building…choosing Miralles required a far reaching vision that was absent from any similar public building in England in the last 100 years…parochialism is something you can definitely level at England, especially when you leave the rarefied architectural nirvana that is Clerkenwell and Shoreditch. But Scotland does show a remarkable openness to modernity that England most certainly does not. I do not think we have that much to complain about. There are plenty of young architects in Scotland building momentum however the difficulty in landing a large public commissions is just as problematic everywhere – and its nothing to do with stararchitect discrimination, its much more to do with the increasingly punishing pre-qual restrictions and the ever spiralling complexity of commissions of this nature; soon it will only be Atkins that can take on anything bigger than a primary school… However, back to the Art School example, I do think it does the process of Steven Holl’s selection a bit of a disservice to bring nationality into it. We should applaud a process that picked the best proposal and to hell with nationalistic overtones. Imploring that NORD got the gig may be the same as an argument in County Wexford a few years back that an Irish practice should have got the commission that NORD have done so fine a job on. And if I am not mistaken Alan Dunlop tried to wrench a plum commission away from the poor downtrodden Northern Ireland architectural fraternity a few years back with his unsuccessful Lyric theatre competition entry…and I, as a Belfast native am eternally grateful that O’Donnell and Tuomey got it and not some plucky local practice… O’Donnell and Tuomey just happened to have the best scheme! And back to Scotland, I believe Miralles’ parliament is vastly superior to whatever Murphy would have delivered; I believe that Zaha’s transport museum will be superior to the Hoskins proposal and ultimately Holl’s art school will be seen to be the correct choice….that is not implying any inferiority in Scottish architects, its just merely pointing out that when you cast the net far and wide you will get the best possible result. Hence why the world uses architectural competitions!