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Features/opinion

Saturday column: Festival Centre proposal a chapter that remains unfinished

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Editor
Aug 09, 2025
∙ Paid

THE Edinburgh International Festival was barely a decade old when plans were unveiled for a dedicated ‘Festival Centre’, in and around the Usher Hall on Lothian Road.

It was an unapologetically modernist vision (as illustrated, here) being proposed in 1957 by architects, Michael Laird, Douglas Laird and Alan Reiach.

It imagined two, 15-storey towers flank…

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