THE EVERYMAN LIBRARY

Libraries may be places of private study but Mecanoo’s designs for Birmingham’s new Central Library are an expression of founder Francine Houben’s unassailable belief in the public realm – right down to the loos

Words Jan-Carlos Kucharek

JUDGING FROM THE position of Mecanoo’s office on the Oude Delft, a beautiful and untouched 16th century street running alongside one of the city’s canals past the Oude Kerk, its original church, you get the idea that founding partner Francine Houben’s idea of a ‘route through the city’ is somewhat more picturesque than the one she is actually describing to me. We’re in the practice’s spacious meeting room, a former chapel, the firm’s charming office oozing the same history – even the cool Delft-tiled toilet opposite the meeting room has one tiny window offering a classic view out to the Oude Kerk’s 14th century tower, perfectly framed like a Vermeer miniature. Nestled in the heart of these old streets and squares, and despite a common legacy of bricks and water, it feels a far cry from her talk of wayfinding and public space in Birmingham, and the firm’s £193m Central Library proposal, set to revolutionise it.

Houben describes her first visit to the city and a walk from her hotel east of the centre to the Birmingham Rep theatre, adjacent to the proposed site of the new library on Centenary Square, as initially an exercise in complete disorientation. ‘When I first started walking to the theatre I kept thinking, Where am I? Where am I going?’ she recalls. ‘But then I realised that all you had to do was start following the crowd. Everyone, it turns out, is walking the same route across the city. I call it the “red line”, linking the Bullring with Centenary Square.’ That route became a key component of her firm’s proposal – a human ‘desire line’ winding its way around the ‘soft hills’ of the existing urban landscape, negotiating what she calls the city’s ‘complex and dominant post-war infrastructure’.

Dealing with the urban condition is something that Dutch firm Mecanoo has been doing for a while. The charged and animated Houben has carved a successful career from city interventions, building housing, office developments and museums since 1984 in her native Holland, but it was the firm’s 1993 competition-winning Technical University of Delft library, a monumental grass wedge, an artificial hill pinned to the landscape by a huge steel cone, that truly brought it to international prominence. The challenge was to build a library next to a huge auditorium, The Aula. The 1951 structure, by van den Broek and Bakema, is highly uncompromising, crouched on the terrace of the campus like a giant concrete frog about to spring. Mecanoo’s proposal was, in Houben’s words, ‘to give the frog some grass’. The result was a library building unlike any seen before. Deferring completely to its neighbour, it is shrouded in an artificial landscape that relieves the unrelenting flatness of the site. The green roof covers what is in fact an enormous reading room with one gargantuan bookshelf, the rest stored in basement carrels, briefly glimpsed through glazing as the grass elevation grows out of the ground. In summertime the roof is an agora, populated by students hanging out. In winter, they snowboard down it. It is precisely this kind of radical programmatic thinking that Birmingham council wants Houben to bring to bear in her design for the new Central Library.   

And despite Houben’s initial disorientation, it’s a city that’s grown on her. ‘It’s got a lot of energy, the largest number of young people of any city in Europe, and a sizeable ethnic population. All of that can be seen in the existing library, which draws in 5,000 users a day,’ she says, a fact that, she goes on to explain, is due in no small part to its key positioning along her ‘red line’ westwards across the city to Centenary Square. The walkway beneath the existing 1974 brutalist structure, designed by local architect John Madin, goes over one of Sir Colin Buchanan’s justly maligned 1960s ring roads, but sees 12 million pairs of feet walk across it every year. With a footfall like that, it’s no wonder developer Argent has snapped up the long lease on a prime piece of real estate. With Birmingham council it plans to knock it down, transfer its five million books and city archive to the new building, bang in the middle of Centenary Square, and turn the site over to a 200,000m2 of mixed-use development. The new library complex will be the terminus to the ‘red line’, rather than encountered en-route.

Centenary Square is long and narrow, with two buildings facing on to it – the 1971 Rep theatre and a dour Portland stone office block, Baskerville House, separated by a large car park – the proposed site. Houben’s idea is to play to the public space aspect of the route through the city. ‘I wanted our building to complete a grand elevation, to physically connect with the Rep, and yet for it to be distinct – the idea of “three palazzos” was a formative one.’
The materiality that will express her palazzo is what she calls ‘an industrial veil’ of huge steel hoops that mesh their way up the facade of the building, covering in an identical manner all the functions of public reception, lending library, reference and archive. Houben calls it ‘a contemporary interpretation of the industrial aesthetic’, inspired by numerous gasometers that still pepper the city’s industrial centre. Behind this veil, stacked up over nine floors, the various functions will be connected by massive rotundas staggering their way up the section like Birmingham’s original Rotunda, but sliced and in negative, carving out space, instead of enclosing it. This will form the great circulation route up through the building, with a connectivity based on experience.

‘I have always tried to observe how people use libraries,’ she muses, ‘and I’ve found that people like to sit around voids. Just as in the TU Delft, we intend to use them here, giving people their personal space, and also the choice to engage with the space if they wish – allowing them to be alone but not lonely.’

But Houben thinks the design’s real moves are being made in terms of public space. Over the ground, lower ground and mezzanine levels the library will not only connect to the Rep theatre, providing a new foyer and 300-seat auditorium, but will offer an ‘NHS Health Exchange’ for the public to access information on health issues. Most notable however is that connection with the square itself, not only in terms of the public balconies that will overlook it from high level, but in the large rotunda carved out of the square immediately in front of the building. Accessed from beneath the square, it is intended to be an ancillary performance space for the Rep, but set adrift in the uncontrolled space of the public plaza. Houben confirms that ‘yes, it’s for performance, but it’s also public and multi-functional, a place of unpredictable change. It is an uncontrolled space, but I am not afraid of that.’ Just like the roof of the Delft library, the amphitheatre and the rotundas to which they connect are a gamble, but in a far more challenging environment, on her unassailable belief in the public realm.

Houben mentions the proposed design getting a good response from Cabe, and of the supportive nature of the engineer on the project, Buro Happold, but does admit that ‘I’ve never been in so many meetings with so many consultants’.  Certainly issues like how you stop the spirograph facade from becoming an enormous pigeon roost are being addressed in them, but you feel she can sense battles brewing over things like raised floors (‘I hate them – no sense of permanence’) and suspended ceilings (‘we will have exposed soffits’), and given the highly serviced nature of the typology, she’s going to need Happold on board to win them. Recently she’s been fighting a case for huge banks of toilets grouped in the lower levels, against building regulations, whose accessibility requirements demand that they be distributed evenly around the building. Positioned here, ‘they could become a public amenity for the city, accessible for all, be cleaned easily, and could be monitored. I cannot think why you would want to design them in any other way.’ It’s an argument born of social consciousness that speaks volumes about Houben’s tenacity and design clarity. This lady, you feel, is definitely not for turning.

Unless you’re on the roof, of course. Puncturing through the metal veil at the top of the building, one stone rotunda crowns the top of the library, which will give views out over the whole city. For Houben, it’s a point of great symbolic significance for the library, and the sectional terminus for the building on the circular route up it. This will be the position of the Shakespeare Memorial Room, designed in 1882 by JH Chamberlain, the architect of the old Central Library. It is proposed to reinstate its ostentatious display of Victorian faux-Elizabethan carvings, marquetry and metalwork, as well as the original collection of the Bard’s works. ‘As an object, it signifies learning, the history of the previous building and the city itself, and the experiential route through the new library will culminate at its door. As such it is a cultural symbol.’

You can tell that Houben is still cogitating about how she is going to fit this very square peg in a round hole, but you sense that, in terms of a design concept, she has come full circle. In linking a route through the city with a route through a building, leading to an old building within a new one, she’s been building up a robust plot line and narrative for the whole design. And in the context of library design, you couldn’t ask for much more than that.

Photo credits: Birmingham City Council/Hayes Davidson, Mecanoo, Christian Richters