Scottish Parliament Building

This building was supposed to cost £40 million. It ended up costing £414 million, arrived three years late, and was designed by a Spanish architect who died before it was finished. The Scottish Parliament Building is either a catastrophic waste of public money or one of the greatest pieces of architecture built in Britain in the last century, depending on whom you ask. Among architects and critics, the answer is increasingly the latter — it won the Stirling Prize in 2005, Britain's most prestigious architecture award, posthumously honouring its creator Enric Miralles.

Miralles's design is unlike anything in Edinburgh. He drew inspiration from the Scottish landscape, borrowing forms from upturned boats on the nearby shoreline and motifs from Charles Rennie Mackintosh's flower paintings. The result is a building made of steel, oak, and granite that seems to grow organically from the ground at the foot of Arthur's Seat. The three vaults of the Main Hall were cast on-site and include abstract designs of the Saltire cross. Every detail was considered: the windows of the MSPs' offices are shaped like contemplative eyes, the exterior walls undulate like leaves, and the entire structure was meant to embody the connection between the Scottish people and their land.

The building opened on 9 October 2004 when Queen Elizabeth II formally inaugurated it, seven years after Scotland voted for devolution in the 1997 referendum. For the general public, the parliament was initially famous only for being overdue and over budget. But attitudes have softened over two decades, and visitors today are struck by how the interior spaces — wood-panelled debating chambers, light-filled corridors, the dramatic Canongate Wall — create a genuinely inspiring democratic space.

Tours of the building are free, and you can sit in the public gallery and watch MSPs debate. It's democracy at work, in a building that nearly bankrupted the democracy before it began.