Enlightened Librarian: An inventory of libraries 2: brutalist fortresses that don't need your love

An inventory of libraries 2: brutalist fortresses that don't need your love · Feb 14, 06:06 PM

Chances are, if you’ve attended a university, college or entered a civic building built in the last 35 years, you’ve encounted brutalist architecture. The style is so common it’s practically invisible: on the outside, exposed concrete, obscured entrances and a bunker-like tendency; on the inside, exposed duct work, more concrete and a proletarian, no-nonsense air. It’s hard to see these buildings without their attendant cultural baggage—often shabby with age, then tend to reek of grey bureaucracies and failed 1970s social planning.

Despite its recent connotations, brutalism does have a noble history. After the Second World War the architect Le Corbusier became enamoured of the scuptural qualities of raw concrete—in French beton brut—and the British took to it as a way to rebuild quickly and cheaply. Visit the South Bank or Barbican centres in London and you’ll see brutalism at its most successful. Both are forthright, cantilevered spaces that are both stolid and daring. In Canada, a domesticated brutalism became the hallmark of the national post-Centennial building boom in the 1970s. With a few exceptions, such buildings tend to be uninspired. Canada has many brutalist libraries, and they are not easy to love.

In my adopted city, the main branch of the Ottawa Public Library opened in 1974 to replace the Carnegie-funded library on its site, and although at the time the new building was heralded as a landmark design, it has not aged well. With its few windows heavily recessed behind concrete buttresses, the structure hunkers down as though to reduce its exposure from a blast. In 30 years the building has grown dingy and cramped, without enough space for its expanding collection, and it has lost its interior focal point. (Its atrium entrance had to be rerouted because of too many wheelchair-unfriendly stairs.)

I’ve written before about the library as a secular, light-filled cathedral. There is also the library as an accumulator of the grunge of human use. This is the dark underbelly of the public library that no one wants to talk about: books smell of other people’s cigarettes; some chairs smell faintly of piss. In some circles, the main branch of OPL is considered unsalvagable, because its dowdy atmosphere is past redeeming. Current thinking proposes a new site, and a brand-new building, somewhat west of downtown. Evacuation would be a shame, though, both because it would separate the library from the densest part of the city and also send a message that discarding the past is okay.

It is not.

Photo of Winnipeg Public Library -- the Millennium edition

Winnipeg’s revitalized central library offers an encouraging alternative. Cast in a dour brutalist mould, the 1977 building received a major facelift by having its rear profile replaced with a wall of glass. A five-storey “reading terrace” creates an inviting gathering place to read in the sun. The new enhancements even reflect positively on the building’s concrete shell, making it look attractive and muscular—less Soviet than ever. Without the funds to build over again, WPL took the enlightened step of working with what they have. The result is an architectural success story, and a triumph of library values.

We’re reusers and recyclers, and we never retreat from our users, no matter who they are.

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