Does anyone actually like the new Birmingham Library building? Why have they covered the outside in what looks to me like barbed wire?…it’s a library for gods sake! Why make it look so unwelcoming, harsh and incarcerating?
It’s supposed to be a building of learning, culture, education etc…it looks like a prison!!!
Birmingham Library Building – Side View
Birmingham Library Building – Front View
It will sit between The Rep Theatre a lovely building that looks like it’s supposed to be…and Baskerville House – the lovely traditional looking ex civic centre building. The new library is a talking point…but not a complimentary one…it’s more to do with people talking about it in a detrimental way…a ‘what the bloody hell is that?’ kind of comment!
These planners, designers and architects really do take the piss and then talk to anyone that actually opposes their designs in patronising tones. Well this building is an awful design from the outside. I only hope the inside is more suiting to the needs of a modern library / archives centre.
At a cost of £188.8 million you’d think they would consider the appeal of the building from the outside and the cosmetic effect on people…but these designers are ‘artists’ aren’t they and we proletariat luddites know nothing do we?
Well I know that these following buildings look and represent more the kind of library I’d like to use.
Manchester
Manchester Central Library
Liverpool
Liverpool Central Library
Glasgow
Glasgow Mitchell Library
Wonderful buildings all…oh and this one was Tipton’s…
Tipton Library
before Sandwell planners decided this was more like it
Tipton Library – Owen House
…to quote Paul Weller / The Jam from The Planners Dream Goes Wrong (1982) …’do the planners get embarrassed when their plans go wrong’?
I concur!!
its worse than the old one – I’m so tired of architects ‘trying’ to make a name for themselves while
making a complete mess in the centre of a lovely civic area, surrounded by brilliant buildings. It just looks
like its covered in a security mesh that doesn’t even join up at the edges. This architecture has no
art to it, it has nothing that appeals, its just some idiot trying for something different.