Faced with imminent demolition following the construction of Mecanoo's new library on Centenary Square, and potential replacement with a group of what appear to be anonymous commercial buildings, the Birmingham Central Library as I know it is destined to cease to exist, consigned to pictures in books, which ironically will probably be stored in the new library. For me the library represents many hours spent conducting research, learning about the evolution of Birmingham from small market town to the workshop of the world and then to what has been referred to by many as the concrete jungle. Having studied the building for my final project of the Post Graduate Diploma, a project to design an archive to replace the one currently located in the attic of the library, I cannot help but be impressed by the library.
Built 1971 – 1973, designed by John Madin Design Group, concrete framed, inverted ziggurat form, designed to be flexible and functional, is part of larger unrealised masterplan and forms the centre piece to the curiously named ‘Paradise Circus’, essentially a traffic island which is home to Birmingham School of Music, (The Adrian Boult Hall), Fletcher’s Walk Shopping Centre including ‘X-posure’ Rock Café. Birmingham Central Library, with Paradise Forum below. Later additions include the black glazed boxes of the Copthorne Hotel and Chamberlain house offices, at what was the outer edge of the city centre before the reconfiguration of the ring road and pedestrian bridge to bring Centenary square into the city. A reconfiguration that places the library on the main route from the central shopping and civic areas to the new entertainment and conference areas to the west of the Inner Ring Road at Broad Street and Brindley Place. With the gradual transformation of the city and removal of the 1960’s Bull Ring, the ongoing reconfiguration of New Street Station, Paradise circus represents the last complete remaining fragment of the Manzoni masterplan for a modern city. The site of the Central Library was originally designed to accommodate the Central Bus Station in its basement, forming a transport hub nestling between the civic buildings that define the city centre, the Gas Hall home of Birmingham’s Museum and Art Gallery and the Council House from the Victorian era, and the Art Deco Baskerville House, the only built element of the ambitious Civic Centre from the 1930’s.
The main pedestrian approach to Paradise Circus is via the amphitheatre of steps that encompasses the Joseph Chamberlain memorial outside the Town Hall built in the era of classical revivalism said to be modeled on a Roman temple of Castor and Pollux, in the Roman Forum resembling the much earlier Parthenon at the Acropolois in Athens. The route is defined by a steady stream of people walking to the city centre from Brindley Place and vice versa. Dominated by Mc Donalds situated in a plastic enclosure based on roman ruins, the Paradise Forum is a later addition to the plaza beneath the inverted Ziggurat that houses the central library.
On the ground? The artificial ground level that defines the public realm beneath the library is defined by a crossing of routes, the route to the left leads past the Conservatiore to a dark stair that doubles back on itself to bring the visitor down into a lost garden and traffic! traffic! traffic! ground level is surrounded by four lanes of traffic moving in a constant stream of conflict, stopping, changing lanes, cutting up other drivers. Choking the trees with a constant barrage of exhaust fumes. What feels like a subterranean street leads through the darkness of the shopping centre and subways to the plaza at the base of the iconic Richard Seifert & Partners' 100m tall Alpha Tower built 1971-1973, the former headquarters of ATV, that later became Central Television before moving out to the far less inspiring 1980s (or is it 1990s?) mock Victorian warehouse at Gas Street. The route rises up gently curving round the edge of alpha plaza to a surface crossing on Broad Street, on crossing Broad Street to the fenced off Centenary Square and Baskerville House and War Memorial and the constant stream of people head towards Paradise Forum and the city centre, crossing the wide bridge that spans four lanes of traffic as the Ring Road joins Paradise Circus.
Walking between the curious book ends of the Copthorne Hotel and the office block that mirrors it, past the grapevine pub on the left and with Italian restaurant on the right below the Library theatre and back into the plastic forum to the pedestrian crossroads. Turning left into the environment of the concrete jungle, a plaza dominated by the blocky stump of a tower an empty rectangular pond and timber walkways that appear to have been added as an after-thought. A heavy concrete bridge crashes into the Gas Hall whilst a sunken car park forms the gloomy outlook from the rooms of the Copthorne Hotel.
A flight of timber steps descends from beneath the tower to a neglected car park with wire netting fence, and another subway running beneath the traffic. Turning right in the subway a path leads up to what was intended as a bus station, a dark space with concrete canopies to protect pedestrian routes from the weather in a typical modernist way. A blocked up door in the base of the concrete tower reveals that it was intended as a lift to the main deck level with its pond and entrance to the library space. Meanwhile down in the space below the deck, what was intended as bus lanes is filled with parked cars. Discarded pieces of the plastic forum lie in the corner and a fenced off narrow slot leads through to the garden that would have probably been taken up with bus lanes if it was it built as intended.
On entering Birmingham Central Library (and Information Services), the visitor moves it is up some steps past a cheerful? security guard to ride up a long escalator. The escalator ride moves up through a space that is framed by a structural with a glass wall to the left and the glass fronted children’s library to the right, to the top an enlarged landing that forms a temporary exhibition space where our studio from Birmingham School of Architecture exhibited our proposals for the new Archive in 1999. The entry space is a void that must be at least five storeys tall, crsis-crossed by bridges makes the experience of going to the library a dramatic one. The sculpted raw concrete gives something of a feel of being inside an ancient temple, as natural daylight is filtered through narrow bands at high level to avoid damaging the books on the shelves, augmented by fluorescent tubes to control the lighting levels. Reading spaces are double height shared volumes, that work well when studying, giving the feeling of being in a great hall. Orange carpet and black Formica desks firmly place the interior in the 1970’s along with microfiche readers, the later addition of 1980’s beige box computer terminals, that are perched on desks everywhere, to access information, access the library catalogue, locate whatever you need. Moving between floors is via escalators that climb through the central atrium giving an impressive view over the top of the tacky plastic statues, curved pediments and columns making up the ‘forum’.
Not everyone likes the look of raw concrete, and with Prince Charles’ comment that the library looks ‘more like a building for incinerating books rather than storing them’ would not have helped the public like the modern building. Opinions based on appearances are subjective, but as an architectural piece that is a representative of its era, and as a building built for a specific task of protecting the documentation of our culture, for me it performs very well, and when studied in 1999 it was 25 years old and could easily have performed for another 25.
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