Dear Sir, I am writing in response to the publication of the new design for the rebuilding of Birmingham’s Public Library.
A library is a temple to honour man’s recorded intellectual thought and achievement and this is represented in the books that it houses.
An architect chosen to design a library should therefore represent this temple in intellectual architectural terms. To achieve a spirographic design for the outside of a building requires about as much brainpower as a spirograph instrument has itself.
Apart from that, it is lazy. The building speaking for the architect will say: ‘Oh I can’t think of what to do but cover the building with a spirographic design’. Why is it that Birmingham cannot come up with outstanding modern architecture?
The inside might be satisfactory and functional but the outside needs to relate in to its surrounding architecture: that is challenging and requires a certain genius.
What both the new library and the citizens that will use it deserve is a design with an intellectual statement that a modern Palladio could come up with.
Angela Wood
Edgbaston
