National Museum of Scotland

For my architectural history class I have to write an essay on a building in Edinburgh, describing the building and giving a critical analysis. I chose to write about the National Museum of Scotland, built in 1998, that sits in the middle of Old Town. The great thing about this is that it's pretty close to my flat so today I went to the museum and took tones of notes and pictures of the architectural aspects of the museum.  I had intended on actually looking at the exhibitions but the architecture of this building stuck out so much that I didn't have any time to look at the exhibitions.

I didn't actually take this picture, I had to get it off the Internet. It was raining today so the picture wouldn't have done the building justice. But as you can tell the building is very modern and sticks out among all of the older buildings around it. 

This is the main entrance part of the museum...doesn't exactly look like a museum right?

This is looking down from the 5th floor at the main entrance.

All along the stairs and in random parts of the museums there were these seats carved into the walls, which I thought was very cool.

There were tons of these niches and cut outs in the walls that serve absolutely no purpose but they were part of the reason I never looked at the exhibition, they were everywhere! And always different shapes...

See here are more odd cutouts...I don't think I even looked at the displays beneath them.

I thought this was really cool. Again serve no purpose, but you can see through them to the other side and I guess they make going down stairs a little more interesting.

I'm certainly going to have my work cut out for me analyzing this building. There was really so much to it and I actually got lost quite a bit (my map didn't help). Maybe I'll go back one day and actually look at the exhibit, which shows the changes Edinburgh's gone through since it's founding.