Alan Clawley updates us on the plans for Paradise Circus.
The drip-feed of information on Paradise Circus continues with the news that London architect Eric Parry has won the competition to design the office block that will replace the Central Library in Chamberlain Square. I had not heard of Parry before as most of his work has been for prestigious commercial clients in the City and West End of London.
Parry is a member of the Royal Academy and an accomplished contemporary designer but anyone seeing his water colour painting of his proposal for Paradise Circus might mistake him for a traditionalist whose style has been chosen because it will match that of the Town Hall and the Council House.
It is a strangely diffident image for an ambitious modern architect who has been chosen to design a flagship building to replace John Madin’s now famous masterpiece. If it were replacing an architectural non-entity it might be welcomed as progress, but when expectations have been raised so high, it can only fail to rise to the challenge.
Former Culture Minister Margaret Hodge refused to list the Central Library because she said that it stood in the way of “stunning new buildings” that would “serve and delight” the people of Birmingham. So far the signs are not encouraging. Unfortunately in my view there are not enough architects who will turn down a job either because they can’t improve on what’s already there or they refuse to destroy the work of a fellow architect.
News has also dribbled out that £80 million of Local Enterprise funding has been added to the £61 million already been given to the developers to pay for razing Paradise Circus to the ground. There is no indication as to what the new money is for. If even a fraction of these huge sums had been spent instead on refurbishing the Library and adapting it to new uses we could have had a truly outstanding building like none other in the world.
But, spending public money just to destroy an eminently re-usable building stretches the definition of regeneration to breaking point. You only have to look at the refurbishment and adaptation work currently going on at Five Ways to see that the model of regeneration being slavishly followed by Argent and the Council at Paradise Circus is out of date.
Sadly, both Rob Groves and Albert Bore are too proud to admit that after 15 years of delay and one property crash they have missed the boat. They refuse to accept that they are preparing to commit an act of cultural vandalism. In the meantime, unnoticed by them, public appreciation of Brutalist architecture has risen by leaps and bounds. The longer the Library remains standing to higher it will get.
The highly successful ‘Raw Beauty’ celebration of Brutalism organised by Friends of the Library and the Twentieth Century Society (28th June) brought architecture enthusiasts, experts and activists to Birmingham from Preston, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool London, Ireland, Scotland and California. Such is the fame of the Central Library and the popularity of buildings like it that enough people paid up to £35 to nearly fill the 115-seat John Lee Lecture Theatre at the Birmingham and Midland Institute. They got seven illustrated lectures, a walking tour of the city centre, a mass picnic on the steps below the Library and a free Ziggurat cup-cake.
Some weeks later I was filmed on the same steps for Midlands Today. To show how fashionable it had become in the 15 years since the redevelopment idea was first hatched, I unfurled a new art poster of the Library that has been published in a series ‘Discover Yesterday’s Forgotten Future’. I had just bought one online for £35. In the brief clip that was broadcast I said “what will replace the Library will be good, but it won’t be outstanding – it will be just like any other city centre”.
Rob Groves didn’t even bother to challenge my view, but doggedly repeated the tired line that the Library had to go to make way for a new pedestrian street. In the studio discussion John Grindrod (Concretopia) heroically stuck up for the Library and avoided being trapped into saying that he liked all 1960s buildings.