REINVENTING THE LIBRARY

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Francine Houben built a spectacular library for Delft. Now she has a bigger challenge: Birmingham. Robert Butler meets her ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2010

The act of reading, always self-contained, has become even more so in the last 15 years. You hardly have to leave the house. If you need to be at your desk, you can order books at any time; if you need to save money, you can find secondhand books for little more than the cost of postage; if you need advice on what to read, there are recommendations galore; if you want to look up almost anything, there’s an encyclopedia with 15m articles; and if you are running out of reading material, you can buy an electronic reader that stores 1,500 volumes, with another 500,000 to download. All this feels like bad news for the public library. Fewer people these days want to have to return a book within 28 days, or else pay a fine of 15p a day. Library visits are down, borrowing is down, and as the financial crisis leads to deep cuts, libraries look certain to merge.

Blame the laptop. A revolution in how we read and learn has taken place in the lifetime of today’s teenager. Sixteen years ago, as Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa and O.J. Simpson fled very slowly from the police in a white Ford Bronco, Amazon.com was born. It was the first of four blows to public libraries: the others were Google (b. 1998), Wikipedia (b. 2001) and the Kindle (b. 2007). With these shiny new tools to hand, why would anyone step inside a library? Except to escape the rain.

Puzzling, then, that Seattle’s spectacular 11-storey glass-and-steel library opened in 2004. And that Britain’s most popular library, in terms of visits and books lent, is Norwich’s Millennium Library (2001). And that the four Idea Stores in Tower Hamlets, London (2002-06), have found new ways to interact with their communities. And that Birmingham City Council is spending £193m on a new public library, to open in 2013. This has to be more than a fit of nostalgia.

The Birmingham library is fuelled by ambition. Birmingham has set itself the target of becoming one of the world’s top 20 most livable cities on the Mercer chart, joining a first division that in 2009 had Vienna, Zurich and Geneva at the top. (Birmingham was down at 56th, equal with Glasgow.) The Big City Plan requires £17 billion of investment. Britain’s second-biggest city with over a million people, Birmingham is known for its commercial drive and religious non-conformism, but will struggle to match Vienna for cultural clout. Its civic pride in its theatres, galleries, concert halls, conservatoire and ballet company has to contend with the Brummie accent, associated with stodginess and despondency. When pigs feature in British TV commercials, they tend to speak Brummie. “Birmingham is a fantastic cultural city,” says its chief librarian, Brian Gambles. “But its image to the outside world is not that, and we know that.”

The new library is seen as an image-changer—for libraries as well as for Birmingham. A survey showed that 52% of the British public had not used a library in the past 12 months. If they need convincing, so do politicians: last year the American Library Association reported that 41% of their libraries had suffered cuts in funding. “We need to reinvent the whole way a library works,” says Gambles. “I don’t think there’s anything sacred about library practice.”

This is one reason why the council has chosen a relatively little-known architect for its flagship project, ahead of big names such as Norman Foster. Rather than a flashy signature, this architect has an approach: intuitive, human, sustainable and, frankly, feminine.

Francine Houben sits in her office with her forefinger almost touching the screen of her laptop. She is in Delft, north of Rotterdam, but the screen shows Birmingham city centre. She wears an oblong gold wedding ring and a flat grey-and-black watch that matches her scarf and grey jacket. Her finger points to the place where she first stayed in Birmingham—the Rotunda, a cylindrical high-rise near the shopping centre. She always stays there; rotundas, it transpires, will be a theme.

That first evening, Houben and her husband were seeing a play at the Birmingham Rep, 10 to 15 minutes’ walk away. When they emerged from the building, Houben thought, “How the hell do I get there?” She clicks on her keyboard. “I had to cross this...” A picture appears of a road going under a footbridge, and she gropes for the right word. Underpass, I suggest. “Yes, did I go underneath here?” she asks. “Or did I...?” Her words trail away. “It’s all traffic.”

She had arrived to compete against six other architects for the new library that will be sited next to the Birmingham Rep, a five-minute walk from the present Central Library. She walked out of the Rotunda into a city not unlike Rotterdam, where she lives in a studio house she designed herself, overlooking a lake. Rotterdam was bombed, briefly and heavily, in May 1940; Birmingham was bombed heavily for longer, from 1940 to 1943. Two thousand tonnes of bombs fell on the city, killing 2,200 people. After the war, a rapid increase in population and a zealous belief in the car led the city planner Sir Herbert Manzoni to envisage a transport solution that is Tolkienesque: Inner Ring, Middle Ring and Outer Ring. Birmingham has been trying to break out of its concrete collar ever since.

If, on her way to the theatre, Houben had picked up a heritage map from the tourist office, she would have seen little icons of the Rotunda and other landmarks—the Former Post Office, Council House, Town Hall, Museum and Art Gallery. She might have noticed one major absentee: the library, an inverted concrete ziggurat housing 30 miles of bookshelves, airbrushed out even before it is demolished. The Twentieth Century Society made efforts to have it listed—an architect has two jobs: one, get it built; two, get it listed—but others argued, successfully, that Birmingham needed this building listed like a hole in the head.

You can find an old black-and-white documentary (online, of course) about John Madin, the luckless creator of the inverted ziggurat, and see him hurrying from job to job in a dark suit, white shirt and narrow tie, at a raffish angle, with crooked teeth and gleaming eyes. The creases on his forehead hint at the cares of running the third-largest architectural practice in Britain, with a staff of 100. He’s 41 in the film, which looks like 51 today. When he lectures students on the importance of getting on with the client, the students are smoking. He talks about the number of “motor cars” doubling over the next ten years and because of this—becaws of this—cities need multi-storey car parks and gyratory roads. His vision is appealing enough: one space flowing into the next, small spaces contrasting with big, as when you enter through a low narrow door into the splendour of a Gothic nave.

Visit the library 35 years on, and the audacity of the ziggurat design has been meanly obscured by a new hotel right next door. The concrete cladding has stained badly and bits have fallen off. At the back, litter floats on neglected greenish pools. It’s gloomy inside too: the elevators have a reputation for breaking down, the roof has leaked and people hate the toilets. Asked if the library has WiFi, the receptionist directs me to McDonald’s 20 yards away. The library stands over a drab mall of overfamiliar food outlets (Nandos, Greggs, Wetherspoons) called Paradise Circus.

Five thousand people use this library a day, and you can see why: there’s a health exchange, an archives and heritage service, a business insight centre, a family information service, a learning centre, a centre for the child, and banks and banks of computers. You can even check out your books by yourself. But Brian Gambles feels these modernising steps are not enough. The library has suffered from wear and tear, the building can no longer contain the growing collection, and the current model is outdated. People are using libraries in a new way today. For instance, students work much more in groups. What Gambles wants, he says, is “a library for the learner, not the learned”.

A lot of people hate the building. The brutalist movement comes from “Béton brut”, the French for rough concrete, but the term has long had a whiff of “brutish”. Birmingham hasn’t shown the building the care that its contemporary the National Theatre in London has received. Prince Charles once said Birmingham Library looked like the sort of place where you burn books, not read them. Most of all, what has sunk the current library is timing.