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Overdue

After three decades of struggle, a remarkably unembittered architect completes his British library.

By Michael Sorkin

	The new British Library exterior. (courtesy: The British Library)
	The library's new entrance hall. (photo: Irene Rhoden, courtesy: The British Library)
	A view of the library's main reading room. (photo: Irene Rhoden, courtesy: The British Library)
	Another view of the library's main reading room. (photo: Irene Rhoden, courtesy: The British Library)

Something over 25 years ago, back in my student days, Sandy Wilson came to MIT to present his scheme for the British Library in London. A certain aura sparkled around (the much younger) Wilson, the result of his having won what seemed to be the commission of a lifetime at a relatively tender age. Wilson could scarcely have imagined then that the library would take a professional lifetime to get built.

Finally complete after a 36-year slog (as much time, the architect likes to point out, as it took to build St. Paul's), the project has been a nightmare of changing site and program, financial obstacles and critical assaults, foot-dragging, cultural warfare, Tory philistinism, and harassment by the egregious Charles. Through it all, Wilson--a gentle bishop's son, dedicated painter, and former Cambridge don--has remained outwardly unflappable. In a book-length apologia, The Design and Construction of the British Library (1998), his tone is remarkably gracious and unembittered. And Wilson is right to take pride in what he's built.

The huge building sits--on a site that is both complex and difficult--along the north side of Euston Road, a smog-clogged artery that forms the upper boundary of central London. The library's neighbors include Gilbert Scott's flamboyant red brick Gothic Revival St. Pancras railway station, a series of bleak but harmless postwar office buildings, and, to one side, a housing project from the Twenties, modeled on the social housing of Red Vienna.

The most demanding neighbor is St. Pancras, because of both its size and its extraordinary quality. Wilson describes himself as a legatee of the so-called English Free School, a nineteenth-century aesthetic movement descending from (who else?) Ruskin and committed to recombinations of Gothic forms to suit contemporary needs--e.g., railway stations like St. Pancras. He sees the school as a precursor of the "organic" architecture of Wright and especially Aalto.

The library speaks to the station most directly through its facades of beautiful handmade red brick. The match is impeccable and the lovely brick fairly glows. In its massing too, the library pays tribute to the station with a certain reminiscent spikiness.

The message of the red brick, however, is not purely contextual. That the national library of Great Britain--the central receptacle of the nation's intellectual accomplishments--should be built of red brick is redolent of postwar policies for the democratization of education. The "red brick universities" built in the Fifties and Sixties became emblematic of the effort to dissipate the class-based public school/Oxbridge hegemony and replace it with a model of more universal access. The symbolic importance of red brick--that "honest," working-class material--in establishing an identity for these places was inestimably consequential, and the vivid red building on Euston Road surely caps this process.

Most of the critical heat the building has taken to date has been for its exterior, which, to be sure, is no great shakes. Part of the problem is the painfully long gestation, which has given the building a fly-in-amber quality. With its shed roofs, strip windows, clock tower, and brick detail, it looks very much like something out of the Sixties, the actual period of its conception. It looks like the library at a red brick university.

Wilson began the project in collaboration with Leslie Martin, a leading light in a group of British postwar architects that included Denys Lasdun, Basil Spence, and others, and from whom Wilson's own style in part descends. Their architecture shared a thick-walled anti-monumentality that derived from a collision of Modernism, the memory of the "free style," and Morrisoid ruralism--as well as a certain penchant for the Nordic--and that yielded, on occasion, predictably oxymoronic results. None of these architects was an outstanding talent, and their collective oeuvre is characterized by simplicity and an excess of weight combined with a poverty of detail.

Wilson, in particular, has had a long-standing interest in the synthesis of the free-style tradition with Scandinavian Modernism, especially the work of Aalto, whose famous little town hall in Säynätsalo, Finland, is a ubiquitous referent in his work. That amazing ensemble in red brick, with its small, shed-roofed components stepping down the terraced site, is one of the gems of Modern architecture. It clearly inspires Wilson's own sensibility and, by his own account, undergirds the composition of the library.

The problem with the translation is scale. Seen from outside, the library--with its picturesque massing and mild inflections of form--looks like a much smaller work that has received a massive injection of architectural growth hormone. Forms that might be accessible at a small scale are, when blown up to monumental size, robbed of their more intimate satisfactions. This inflation also has the effect of diluting the detail and emphasizing its repetitiveness. Such attenuation calls out for variety, for more moves and layers, not simply for mitotic subdivision.

Entering the site, however, such cavils are blown away. The sequence of arrival leads first across a sequestered forecourt of comfortably generous dimensions, which helps dispel the bustle of the street. The entrance is low and compressive and sets the visitor up for the finest space in the library, the inner entry foyer and circulation space. This is a wonderful, complicated room, perfectly modulated in detail, sufficiently dense, and at once elegant and relaxed. Diagrammatically, this space occupies the interior of a large "A" formed by the two main wings of the library, and the nonparallel framing walls animate and free the space beautifully.

The room opens from the low portal into an upwardly cascading section of great grace and powdery light, a distributor that organizes both program and circulation with clarity. The main stair is to the left (the humanities side of the collection), and bridges cross from the stair to the science wing on the right. In the midst of this room, just beyond the bridges, stands the building's holy of holies, the King's Library: a six-level glass box housing thousands of leather-bound volumes collected by George III. Wilson refers to it as a transparent version of the Kaaba in Mecca.

While this description certainly does justice to the symbolic roles of the collection, the box's real source is both more recent and less spiritual. Indeed, the glass library within an opaque volume was similarly explored by Gordon Bunshaft in his Beinecke Library at Yale, which contains the university's rare book collection. Wilson, who declined to consider the post-Rudolph deanship of Yale's architecture school because of the rush to produce a scheme for the library, has a long association with that university. He would have known the project well, and understood the power of such an object in space and the organization of a perspectival interior landscape around it.

On the far side of the British Library's glass box lies the dining space with the staff refectory beyond. At one end of the space sits a little elevator tower with a Leon Krierish belvedere on top. As you sit with lunch, facing the book box, the picturesque quality of the library becomes clear. And it's a good place--amidst the clink of silver and glass--to appreciate the building's superb acoustics, which are simultaneously sharp and muted. Acoustics are obviously critical to the functioning of a library, and this one produces few notes of discord. Noise levels are highly controlled with no sense that sound is being compressed. I was a bit distracted by the muffled reverberation of my footfalls on the carpeted floor-decking--a hollow service chase--but otherwise impressed by the calm.

The other great environmental necessity for a library is light, and here Wilson is superb. Daylight fills the reading rooms and the public spaces; never direct, it bounces, skims across curves, pours through apertures, and grandly rolls in from big windows. Task lighting too is artful, from the shaded lamps on the reading room tables to the Jacobsen fixtures suspended over the dining room. This careful bending of light to suit a range of purposes, from low-lit exhibition spaces to the bright lobby, is a central achievement of the building.

The reading rooms--the pay dirt of the project--are also successful, if ever so slightly stiff. Wilson devises a variety of conditions to accommodate the psychical and physical needs of readers. By tiering reading spaces within larger reading rooms, he creates a range of places, from dramatically high to snugly enclosed, to suit different tastes. All the appoint-ments are comfortable and of the highest bespoke quality, and the organization of the spaces is very good. If there is any shortcoming, it has to do with the strategy of elaboration. This is pure Modernism, in its lack of whimsy and in its use of repeated geometries and objects to build up a satisfying density of texture with a minimum of applied decoration. The incessant repetition of squares--as lights, registers, coffers, railings--is not altogether synergistic. As with the building exterior, more becomes too much.

In the last analysis, though, the building is a triumph both of perseverance and of architecture. Wilson has had uncanny success in combining comfort, generosity, gentility, and efficiency in a highly unpolemical project. Unlike the new French National Library with its crass symbolism, tacky materials, disdain for urbanity, and Cartesian oversimplification, the British Library everywhere advertises how substantial it is. If it's a throwback, it returns to a sense of dignity and permanence that seems completely on the mark for the national library of the country of Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf.

On the same day I visited the library, I went to have a look at Richard Rogers' Millennium Dome on the other side of the Thames. It provides an interesting comparison, not in the least for what it reveals about what a pound sterling will buy nowadays. The library tipped the scales at something just north of half a billion quid. The dome, on the other hand, is budgeted at 750 million (including extensive site improvements). The library has a planned lifetime of 250 years. The dome will wear out in 30. While these widely differing life spans do not have any intrinsic meaning for architecture, they do speak volumes about the kind of cultural politics--the political economies--that produced them.

Although I was awed by the scale of the dome's construction and the finesse of the envelope, I simply couldn't fathom why, with so many more interesting needs, the Brits bothered. And there was a gnawing in my craw that Sandy Wilson had endured so much abuse in the pursuit of something so fine when this receptacle for corporate kitsch breezed right through. Cruel Britannia.


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