Photo: The power of Scotland

Designed by Catalan architect Enric Miralles, the Scottish Parliament has won a number of architectural awards, including the 2005 Stirling Prize.

The Scottish Parliament is (by some degree) the most incoherent building I have ever seen. Renowned postmodernist Charles Jencks described it as “quite a meal” – faint praise indeed. A very strange mix of post-modernism, brutalism and vernacular architecture, individual bits of the building are spectacular, but the whole is little more than a regurgitated mass of juxtapositions and alien iconographies.

Photo: Quartermile clouds

Clouds reflected in the windows of one of the new (and empty) office buildings that are part of the Quartermile development in Edinburgh on the site of the old Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, just north of the Meadows. Designed by Foster and Partners, it is an interesting and mostly successful juxtaposition of old (i.e. late Victorian) and glass-fronted high-modernist architecture.

Photo: Dunbar propeller

A 4-ton propeller at Dunbar harbour in memory of Robert Wilson, a local man who is one of (at least) four men from across the world who have a claim to have invented the ship’s propeller in the 1830s.

Photo: Brooding Vulcan

The Avro Vulcan, a jet-powered delta wing strategic bomber on static display at the Museum of Flight, East Fortune. Despite the aircraft’s relative rarity, describing it as a ‘static display’ is a misnomer – the Vulcan has clearly been parked and left to rot, as is not uncommon for the outdoor displays at East Fortune.