Tom Roper's Weblog

Machines for reading in

In his post Bibbly-O-Tek, on his splendid blog, Nasty Brutalist and Short, sometimes known as Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, Owen Hatherley discusses library architecture, including Senate House and the British Library, in a way that I wish one could read in the voluminous discussions on library planning and design in our professional literature. That literature makes a virtue of philistinism, our tendency to dismiss aesthetic theory and concentrate instead on floors' load-bearing capacity. Many of us though will recognise his characterisation of building a new library as including 'lengthy gestation, controversy, changes in design, and most of all squabbles over money'.In thirty years of library work, I have rarely been lucky enough to work in interesting buildings. The public libraries of my early career seemed to have been designed to a universal template, whose guiding principle was to be as inoffensive as possible.NHS libraries were generally dire, though my predecessor at Edgware General Hospital was immensely proud of the hand-basin in her office, apparently been included in the design at her express request.
The honourable exception to all this is Basil Spence's library at the University of Sussex, where I worked, though not for long enough.

Senate House

I was at the WESLINE colloquium yesterday, and a report will be yours as soon as I have written it. In the meantime, these picture of Senate House will have to do. Even though they wouldn't give me a job a while back, I still love the building. It reminds me a great deal of the University Library in Cambridge whose tower student fantasists would claim to be stuffed with pornography.

Clocks

Admirable as Spence's University of Sussex campus is, why are there no clocks? I was out running and needed to look up the time. There is a clock on the tower of Falmer church, but that is not visible from the campus.

Basil Spence

The University's website tells me that Basil Spence was born 100 years ago today.
I shall celebrate with a lunchtime look at some of my favourite bits, to wit the cloisters outside the Arts A/B building.
See here for my account of a meeting in 2004 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the University Library  where Anthony Blee, one of Spence's colleagues, spoke.

Whitechapel

"Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy" is both an insult shouted at Ramsay McDonald by James Maxton of the ILP and a rather fine blog on architecture, culture and politics, under the undoubtedly true epigraph, "there is something aphrodisiac about wet concrete". In a recent post the author discusses "David Adjaye's great, Scheerbartian Whitechapel Library," and says, with uncanny perceptiveness, "you can't unreservedly enjoy it, because some bit of glaring Blairist idiocy will hit you - in the Library's case, the moniker 'Ideas Store' (imagine the focus group meeting on that one - no, library's a bit fusty, call it a store and people will come, you know like they do to Bluewater, sniff sniff)..."

Technorati Tags: librarydesign, aphrodisiac, concrete

Designing libraries

I should have known about this ages ago, but it's very good: http://www.designinglibraries.org.uk/

Brighton and Hove libraries in Update

The latest issue of Update is a theme issue on library architecture and includes (in dead tree only, I'm afraid) articles on the Brighton Jubilee library and the refurbishment of Hove library.

Pevsner online

When will someone put the whole of Pevsner online? I mean the architectural historian Nikolaus, not the fictional one-legged footballer Baldy Pevsner. The thought came to me when browsing the public library's copy of the Sussex volume, written with Ian Nairn. I know they're out of date, but even so. It was also be fun to give their words on Seaford wider circulation, "the least gay of the chain of south coast seaside places...It has no pavilion, no amusement arcade and a short esplanade which, at the time of writing [1965-TR], appears far from thriving".
Nairn, Ian and Pevsner, Nikolaus
The buildings of England: Sussex
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965

Technorati Tags: pevsner, seaford

University of Sussex architecture in the Independent

This morning's Independent carries a story on the architecture of the University of Sussex campus. The author, Jay Merrick, doesn't like the BSMS building I fear:
"..a white box with the kind of domed roof you see on trading estates. Its blockwork façades are barnacled with ugly metalwork, and there is an even more overwrought walkway". Speaking of it and the Genome Centre he says they are "shed-moderne jabs in the eye", "outré and lavishly crude", and "a scene painted by De Chirico, sponsored by Lego".
It doesn't seem to be in the online edition.

New NHS library

There's some photographs of the admirable new library in the Audrey Emerton Centre, Brighton and Sussex Universities NHS Trust over in Flickr.