By John Knox BBC Scotland political reporter

The inside is better than the outside. That seems to be the consensus around Holyrood on the new Scottish Parliament building which opens to the public on Tuesday.

The debating chamber will be home to Scotland's 128 MSPs

It's a building full of surprises. It's a concrete village with a strong medieval feel.

The main foyer is a dark vaulted space with Templar-style crosses etched into the ceiling. Great church doors lead to the committee rooms, again with concrete vaulted roofs and sudden shafts of daylight.

Wooden staircases and secret passages lead off in strange directions, going off deep into the interior. I defy anyone to keep their sense of direction inside this whale.

There are nine buildings on this campus, once the site of a brewery, squeezed between Holyrood Palace and the Dynamic Earth exhibition centre.

'Scotland is land'

They all face in different directions and, from the outside, are a jumble of angles, colours, heights and materials.

"Scotland is land," said the architect Enric Miralles, "not a series of cities." So he has designed earth trails from the Holyrood buildings to the nearby Salisbury Crags.

They will eventually be covered with trees, grass and wild flowers to help the grey concrete blocks fit into the landscape.

The main entrance, under a canopy of metal "twigs", leads to a caf�, a shop and reception area.

You follow the main staircase to the public gallery overlooking the debating chamber. This is a huge space - 128 oak and sycamore desks stand in serried ranks before you and, above the mace, the presiding officer's bench keeps strict order.

Each of the Holyrood towers has a different design

Overhead laminated wooden beams arch upwards, like an upturned boat. Lights drop down on metal stalks.

Daylight floods down glass slides from a roof window on one side and on the other there are high windows looking out to the crags.

The public gallery, with 225 seats, provides a view of the back of MSPs heads. Curious, and evidence that this is a building designed by committee.

The public gallery should, of course, be on the other side of the chamber where we would have a view of our MSPs' faces and be able to see out to the crags when things get boring.

Grouped around the chamber building are four high towers, shaped like more of those upturned boats.

They house the committee clerks, the parliamentary offices and government ministers' rooms.

A fifth tower, stuck on as an afterthought, is for the media. The BBC has one small room, with a radio studio and TV editing suite.

Built to last

The walls are bare concrete but the floors are either Caithness stone or wood. The windows and doors are wooden and substantial. They could well last 500 years.

In the middle of each room is a carpet, with the Miralles design - flecks of blue and red and yellow in a dizzy pattern.

There are gasps from visitors as they enter the six committee rooms.

Each one is different but they usually involve a vaulted roof, shafts of light from a high window and spotlights everywhere.

In the middle of each room is an oval shaped table made of oak with sycamore inlays.

My favourite area is the glass covered space between the buildings. It's known as the Garden Lobby.

The Queensberry House gates lead to one of Holyrood's highlights

Here staff can stroll up and down as in a shopping mall, have a coffee or go through to the excellent and cheap canteen.

They can look upwards at the glass "leaves" which, again to me, look like upturned boats.

On one side of this enclosed lobby is Queensberry House. This is by far the best looking part of the campus.

It was built in 1667 but history appears to have passed it by.

Miralles - and not a few others - wanted it knocked down. But because it is an A-listed building it has, under the law, to be preserved.

At great expense it has been restored and painted an incongruous bright yellow.

The presiding officer and his staff occupy this building and it also houses the Donald Dewar reading room to improve the intellectual capacity of the parliament. Quaint.

Next to it, on the Royal Mile, is the Canongate Building. This is a structure which at first sight has no visible means of support.

'Balancing acts'

It is in fact a clever cantilevered structure. Here the IT and finance staff all sit at one end to allow visitors to come into the information centre at the other.

But the best balancing acts are performed in the MSPs block. This six-storey building is composed of honeycombed "monks cells", vaulted rooms, one for each of the 105 backbench MSPs.

Who gets the biggest rooms and where the parties are grouped has been a contentious issue.

But sitting in his bay window, the so-called "thinking pods", the Green MSP Robin Harper told me: " It does induce a mood of reflection just sitting in it, it's wonderful."

This is indeed a curious set of buildings. I began by being against them because, generally, I don't like modern architecture.

But inside, there is a feeling of surprise and character - not to say shock value.

It is an argument in stone. It forces you to think why we built it - why have we spent �431m pounds on this cathedral?

An inscription in the Canongate Wall says it all

Do we believe in democracy this much, �80 for every man, woman and child in Scotland. And if we don't, how has it happened?

We were following all the correct democratic procedures. MSPs voted by a majority of three to go ahead with it all.

It's a pretentious building and leaves us asking the question, is Scotland this important?

Well the answer, surprisingly, is yes. We did vote six-to-four in favour of devolution back in that fatal referendum in the autumn of 1997.

With Donald Dewar, we said: "There shall be a Scottish Parliament."