Architecture
Books do furnish a room
The back cover of the catalogue for Colin St John Wilson's exhibition at the Heinz Gallery (21 Portman Square, Lon- don Wl, until 25 October) shows the archi- tect sitting for his portrait by Michael Andrews. To the right, the canvas shows a grim set face, almost a caricature of grumpiness. Behind and to the left, the actual sitter is laughing. This image, the only item of colour printing in the slim booklet, seems a perfect analogy for the British Library, the building by which Wil- son will always be judged. It is not surpris- ing that public response to the library's exterior has been hostile at worst, muted at best. This is the grim face. To repeat a famous quote, it does look like an academy for secret policemen (whatever that might look like). Fortunately, as one progresses into the building, it becomes more smiling, until, on reaching the little circular restau- rant terrace at the back, the mood is almost frivolous.
It is not easy to write about the British Library. The circumstantial evidence of cost and delay, abuse and counter-attack, is inclined to get in the way of objectivity. Now it is about to open, we should be grateful for what we've got. Nothing like this will ever be built again, and, although this may be a relief to the building's critics, Wilson also rightly says that the quality of materials and workmanship is unlikely to be seen again in a project of this size. A virtue of slow construction was the ability to prototype and test a great many details in timber, metalwork and leather and it is built to last.
It is also difficult to write about the Library because it is a design of the mid 1970s, a period inevitably in a trough of fashion at present. Even the evidence of Wilson's later library designs, a little round school library in Chelmsford and a larger one for Queen Mary College, suggests that its basic composition might now be approached in a different, less fragmented way. Few architects since the hedonist Eighties would allow the virtuousness of this extremely moralistic building to be so apparent. The uneasy impression of the British Library comes from its response to the non-orthogonal shape of the St Pancras Goods Yard site, generated from an obtuse angle at the junction of Euston Road and Midland Road which other architects might have fudged or concealed. The angle is amplified in the atrium where the two dif- ferent kinds of library (humanities and sci- ences) are divided like sheep and goats, and the wedge-shaped space offers many pleasing cross-vistas. It is a Chinese box, much bigger on the inside than the outside, within which a tall black box contains the King's Library, where library staff will be seen extracting leather-bound volumes like bees in a hive. All this spectacle (as well as the courtyard outside) will be open to the public and will be a great asset to London.
The long Science, Patent and Oriental reading-rooms in the ship-like side block have a restfulness that the squarer humani- ties reading-rooms seem to lack, unless one is a devotee of the 45-degree axis, one of Wilson's gifts to posterity through his teaching at Cambridge. Trained initially at Cambridge during the war, he returned to practise and teach with Sir Leslie Martin. In 1957 Alvar Aalto's speech on receiving the RIBA Gold Medal converted him from the Cartesian grid planning of his early designs to 'The Other Tradition', as exem- plified by Aalto and Hans Scharoun who changed modern architecture from a smooth machine style into a changeful, unpredictable dialogue between form and programme. It is hard, although not impos- sible, to design large public buildings by these means, because the designer's essen- tially personal decisions become writ so large, and only a few such buildings really sing their syncopated tune.
Much effort in architectural thinking since the 1970s has gone into recapturing the sense of celebration in public architec- ture by more predictable and legible means, which include a variety of responses to traditional typology, so that a library looks like a library. Whatever that might look like, one could add, although it is interesting that Wilson was a member of the team which won the competition for the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, a public library on the scale of the BL with a highly figurative, semi-classical exterior by Thomas Beeby. If the British Library's quality of embarrassment about showing off in public now seems out of place, it is because the question of self-presentation, almost unmentionable in 1975, has emerged so strongly as part of our later architectural agenda.
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