A new chapter for libraries

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By Edwin Heathcote - Financial Times

A reflection on the changing face of a pivotal urban institution as the new £188m Library of Birmingham prepares to open to the public

©Charlie Bibby

The £188m Library of Birmingham, which opens on Tuesday

That wonderful, mad ambition to contain all the knowledge in the world has been with us for millennia. The Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC became the archetype, an Atlantis of lost learning and a symbol of a city. Later the torch would pass from cities to monasteries and palaces, as libraries became tools with which to praise God or monuments to wealth and power. These were secret, privileged environments: the monks at their cold, hard carrels, the princes and their cabinets of curiosity, the new universities with books chained to desks and locked behind cupboard doors.

It was the Enlightenment that inaugurated a rational new age based on knowledge, in which access to that knowledge was no longer seen as dangerous but as desirable. The Victorians, with a characteristic blend of paternalism and civic pride, instituted libraries as engines of self-improvement testifying to the dynamism of their new industrial cities. Books lost their chains and the library remains one of the few spaces in which we can feel we are citizens rather than consumers, a place to which access is free, in which we ourselves become free.

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Today the solid, reassuring presence of the civic library is threatened, and not just by government cuts; the internet, we are told, is obviating the need for books. Yet the recent explosion in the building of big, spectacular and self-consciously symbolic libraries around the world would seem to contradict that idea. The latest of these, the £188m Library of Birmingham, will be Europe’s largest in terms of floor area when it opens on Tuesday. It is the fourth central library to serve Britain’s second city, the first having been built in 1865 and the third still standing just around the corner, a Brutalist 1970s inverted ziggurat now sadly doomed to demolition.

The new library is an unmissable landmark and its exuberance has, even before it has opened, enlivened the sparse plaza between the sombre neoclassical Baskerville House and the municipal modernism of Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo, it is a gesture that allows the public sector to match the sculptural bravado of the nearby Bullring shopping centre’s striking, amoeboid Selfridges. Like Selfridges, the library seems to have borrowed motifs from fashion. The façade of interlinking circles looks more like a Tokyo fashion store than a civic structure, its open, glazed floors far more accessible than those of any of its austere predecessors.

The contemporary library is, of course, something very different to the stolid classical pile of a century ago. Designed to be open and light, modern libraries take their language more from the commercial corporate office than the civic landmark. They are also – whatever bibliophiles like me might think – about more than just books. As media come and go, from scrolls to VHS cassettes and CD-ROMs, the library adapts.

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And in The Guardian:

Why public libraries are glamming up

Politicians have realised that they get more bang for their buck if they spend money on libraries rather than museum and gallery projects