BRITISH LIBRARY, LONDON

Designed by Colin St. John Wilson; completed 1998 London, England
The British Library is arguably the most significant and controversial 20th-century
public building in London, equal in importance to Sir Williams Chambers’s Somerset
House in the 18th century and Charles Barry and A.W.N.Pugin’s Houses of Parliament in
the 19th century, and the largest public building commissioned in the 20th century. In
terms of its centrality as an institution, urbanistic visibility and impact, cost (£511
million, contrasted with £400 million for Norman Foster’s Stansted Airport Outside
London, and £35.5 million for the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London,
1990), size, length of gestation and realization, programmatic complexity, and
architectural uniqueness, the British Library has no contemporary rivals. Its designer, the
erudite Colin St. John Wilson (who earned a knighthood on its completion) enjoys a
professional history non-pareil in modern Britain, comparable only to those 19th-century
Beaux-Arts laureates who devoted entire careers to executing one or two major official
buildings, or to his noble forebear, Sir John Soane, who labored over the Bank of
England from 1788 to 1831 (although, unlike that vanished monument, destroyed in
1922, the British Library is likely to endure for several centuries).
Until 1998 the name of the British Library was synonymous with the British Museum,
where it had resided since 1785; first in Montague House and after 1826 in Robert
Smirke’s colonnaded Greek Revival stronghold. From 1857 scholars perused books in the
beloved round reading room surrounded by book stacks constructed by Sidney Smirke in
the open courtyard of the museum under a ferro-vitreous dome. Exponential growth of
the collection and readership led, in 1951, to a proposal for expansion. In 1962 Sir Leslie
Martin (1908–2000) and his younger colleague, Colin Wilson (who by 1964 was solely in
charge) were commissioned to design a new wing, adjacent to the existing museum
building, which would be part of a mixed development of commercial, residential, and
institutional uses.
Over the next 12 years, two different schemes were thoroughly worked out by Wilson
for the Bloomsbury site, but the developing Preservationist movement demanded a
different location. Furthermore, the merger in 1972 of the British Museum library with
the National Science library necessitated a larger site. In 1973 the government acquired
nine acres next to St. Pancras Station, for a completely independent structure. Over the
next 25 years, Wilson and his partners, including his wife, library expert M.J.Long
(1939–), grappled with shifting governments, altered requirements, surly bureaucrats,
inflation, tight budgets, fickle architectural fashion, transformations in information
technology, and fallible contractors, to bring to fruition a great library that, in the words
of its architect, “embodies and protects the freedom and diversity of the human spirit in a
way that borders on the sacred.”
The relocation of the British Library was advantageous for many reasons.
Not only did it allow for a more capacious building that would not be
crammed onto an inadequate site (integral to the design was the notion of
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expansion; only the first phase of a three-phase program has been erected),
but it represented a move to a part of London that, while more mercantile
and industrial than Bloomsbury, has a great future as an international
gateway, as it will provide a second terminus for cross-channel transit and
is the hub of several rail and underground lines. Fortunate too is its
proximity to St. Pancras Chambers (1878), now undergoing extensive
restoration. Sir George Gilbert, Scott’s Gothic Revival station and hotel,
completed in 1878 (also fiercely criticized in its time), is a more
sympathetic neighbor than the solemn stone museum, given Wilson’s
preference for the English Free style of the mid- and late 19th century over
the neoclassical movement that preceded it. Both ensembles are
multipurpose and contain very large spaces as well as more intimate
rooms; both draw passersby toward them by inflecting away from the
street; both have dramatic contrasts of vertical and horizontal volumes (a
slender clock tower on the library gestures to the bustling silhouette of St.
Pancras); and both are polychromatic (the pinkish-red brick used in the British Library comes from the same
Leicestershire source as that chosen by Scott), and in each case details are painted in
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contrasting hues. Further, the majestic train sheds behind the station, by engineers Ordish
and Barlow, anticipate the tremendous spans encountered in the library.
The library serves a diverse assortment of functions and audiences: it is an urban
stage, a forum, an art gallery, and a repository of knowledge. The generous plaza
provides an inviting oasis within a dense quarter of the city and caters to the casual
passerby as well as the bibliophile through impressive sculptures, generous seating, and
an outdoor coffee shop; it also gives access to a conference center with auditorium, which
can be entered independently when the main building is closed. Within the library, the
public is immediately welcomed; the information desk and cloakrooms on the ground and
lower levels and the cafeteria restaurants on the second and third floors are readily visible
and accessible. To the left are the bookshop and a two-story exhibition area, properly
protected from daylight, where rare manuscripts and educational materials are on display.
On the fourth floor, the Friends’ room leads to an ample landscaped terrace that
overlooks the urban scene to the northeast. Although the sections show a complicated
matrix of interlocking spaces, clear circulation patterns enable visitors to swiftly reach
different destinations.
The reading rooms are flooded with inspirational, carefully controlled natural light, as
is the main reception hall, which soars through the full height of the building and is the
hinge between the humanities wing on the northwest and the science wing to the east.
Those seeking information on technical subjects, where journals, ephemera, and
electronic media are the rule, frequent the five reading rooms devoted to science. Tables
are arranged around the perimeter and daylight enters through side windows; here, the
reference materials are immediately available to readers, as that is the way most such
researchers operate. The two humanities reading rooms, endowed with clerestories and
skylights that bounce natural light off curved reflector walls, vary in proportion as well,
allowing different temperaments to choose their preferred niches, open or intimate,
central or peripheral. There are smaller enclosures for maps, manuscripts, and rare books
and music. The books are stored in environmentally monitored levels below ground
(additional volumes are stored off-site); the automated catalog and mechanized delivery
make retrieval swift and efficient.
Wilson’s own scholarly habits have sensitized him to the comfort of the researchers.
The variety in the size, shape, and illumi-nation of the spaces counters potential reader
fatigue and contributes a sense of serenity and well-being that embraces both patrons and
staff. Custom-designed furniture of wood and leather and carefully placed, beautifully
detailed lamps and fittings provide a zone of concentration within the grander reaches of
the reading rooms.
Wilson’s credo that architectural form must derive from thoughtful attention to
program and that it must be humane and inclusive means that the British Library presents
no monolithic image to be captured in a single photograph. Rather, the building can be
appreciated only over time by a moving and involved observer/user. This is not to say
that Wilson overlooks the beauty inherent in the striking form or in materials that appeal
to touch and hearing as well as sight. Besides the typical concrete, brick, and glass, the
palette includes Purbeck stone, travertine, bronze, brass, leather, terra-cotta, glazed tile,
luscious carpeting, American oak, African teak, and steel painted red and green; as one
moves from public to private areas, the materials become softer and more sensual. The
aesthetic heart of the building, a literal tour de force, is the six-story glass and bronze box
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that houses the King’s Library, George III’s collection of rare books, donated to the
nation by George IV. The tower appears to arise from the watery depths beneath London,
thanks to the surrounding softly lighted and reflective “moat” of polished stone. A close
friend of many British artists, Wilson made certain that relevant art was included from
the start, such as the tapestry by R.B. Kitaj, the colossal sculptural transcription of
William Blake’s Newton by Eduardo Paolozzi, the bronze-cast typographic entrance
gates by David Kindersley, and the numerous busts, including, since 1999, one of the
architect himself, by Celia Scott.
Committed to “the other tradition” of modern architecture, Wilson pays subtle homage
in his masterwork to revered predecessors, especially Alvar Aalto and Hans Scharoun,
and there are discreet references to Frank Lloyd Wright, Sigurd Lewerentz, Le Corbusier,
Louis Kahn, James Stirling, H.P.Berlage, and Gunnar Asplund. However, this is no
Postmodern pastiche; rather, Wilson has assimilated the lessons of those masters to forge
an unmistakably personal synthesis that serves London urbanistically, aesthetically, and
programmatically in its own unique way, thoughtfully designed with its users’ comfort
and convenience in mind no less than producing an atmosphere conducive to scholarship,
contemplation, and general learning combined with sensual pleasure and intellectual
enjoyment.

BRICK

“A common, ordinary brick,” says Woody Harrelson, playing an architect in the movie Indecent Pr oposa l
(1993), “wants to be something more than it is.” Harrelson proceeds to turn this
proposition into a metaphor for the human condition, something never envisioned by the
real architect who served as an inspiration for the movie’s monologue. It was Louis
I.Kahn (1903–74) who first posed a question in the early 1970s that has since attained
legendary status within architectural circles: “What do you want, brick?” The answer,
according to Kahn, is that brick wants to be an arch and not merely an in-fill or cladding
material with no structural role.
In fact, a key to understanding brick as a modern architectural material lies precisely
in its dual potential to be both structure and cladding. For the greater part of the history of
architecture, brick walls assumed both roles, simultaneously supporting floors and roof
while at the same time providing enclosure. It is only since the late 19th century that it
has become possible to separate those roles by creating an independent framework of
steel or reinforced concrete (structure) to which exterior brick may be attached
(cladding). In this case, the brick no longer supports the floors and roof, although its
appearance as cladding might well obscure this fundamental distinction.
From the Kahnian viewpoint, brick as mere cladding was inherently suspect.
However, other modernists were equally distrustful of brick as load-bearing structure, as
this seemed to negate the idea of the “free plan,” the independence of structural
framework from means of enclosure, and the opportunities for large glass areas. In fact,
an influential faction of early 20th-century modern architects and theorists eschewed the
use of brick in any form, associating it with the 19th-century cultural forces that they
were attempting to overcome. They lobbied instead for the 20th century’s revolutionary
new materials of construction: glass, steel, and reinforced concrete. Where construction
with brick walls was still found expedient within this context, a coat of plaster could
transform the deviant surface into something acceptably plain and neutral. As a symbol of
traditional culture and pre-industrial technology, brick was an easy target. However,
brick’s traditional role as load-bearing structure was also legitimately challenged by the
need for greater heights and larger spans in the new commercial and industrial structures
of the 19th and 20th centuries and by the ascendancy of heterogeneous, layered exterior
wall systems that could accommodate air and vapor barriers, thermal insulation, and an
air space (cavity) to block the migration of water through exterior walls.
Nevertheless, brick was never rejected absolutely and was, on the contrary, often
found capable of embodying precisely the abstract formal values that helped define the
new modernist aesthetic. Even load-bearing brick buildings remained influential well into
the 20th century, acting as a kind of conservative moral datum of “honest” construction
(what the brick really “wanted to be”) opposed to some, but not all, modern tendencies.
Architects continued to use brick with enthusiasm and, like Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–
1959), boasted that in their hands the ordinary brick became “worth its weight in gold.”
Other practitioners, however, were less confident about the appropriateness of brick in
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modern construction; for them, brick represented a kind of compromise—accepted with
various degrees of ambivalence—between the new culture, technology, and aesthetics of
the 20th century and those that preceded it. At the same time, brick itself was subject to
technological change, evidenced not only in the increased systemization of its
manufacture, begun in the late 12th century and culminating in the 19th century’s
relentless mechanization of all aspects of the brick-making process, but in the application
of Frederick Taylor’s theory of scientific management to bricklaying in the first decades
of the 20th century.
Brick was widely used throughout the 20th century, accommodated within virtually all
styles. The chronological survey that follows is therefore necessarily incomplete and
somewhat arbitrary. That being said, several key developments can be high-lighted,
starting with the period before World War I. Already, a number of trends can be
discerned in the late 19th century that continued to be played out well into the 20th. The
first can be illustrated by Daniel Burnham’s design for the Monadnock Building in
Chicago (1889) and H.P.Berlage’s Amsterdam Stock Exchange (1903), both of which
pointed the way toward a reinterpretation of brick informed by the modernist bias toward
simple, relatively unornamented surfaces, even when used in load-bearing wall
construction. A second, more complex tendency can be seen in the brick facade of Louis
Sullivan’s Wain-wright Building in St. Louis (1890), which, while functioning as
nonstructural cladding, was meant to express symbolically the “idea” of the steel
framework behind it. What resulted, though, was a certain ambiguity—some would call it
deceit—in which the actual construction of the building was severed from its outward
form.
A third trend derives from 19th-century brick-walled factory buildings characterized
by flat brick surfaces, functional massing, and the use—at least internally—of heavy
timber or cast-iron structural elements. In Hans Poelzig’s chemical plant at Luban (1911),
the asymmetric massing and unornamented surfaces were distinctly modern; in contrast,
the small, rectangular and arched window openings that punctuated the brick walls
evoked a premodern sensibility. On the other hand, the Fagus Werk factory in Alfeld-ander-
Leine (1911) and the model factory, Werkbund exhibition, Cologne (1914), by
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer—both brick-clad buildings—contained elements of
classical axiality in their massing while their innovative glass curtain walls, when
photographed from the proper perspective, gave the buildings a dynamic modern
appearance. An additional variation on this theme can be seen in Poelzig’s Upper Silesia
Tower in Posen (1911), where brick cladding is clearly expressed as nonstructural “infill”
within an actual structural frame exposed on the building’s surface. However, this
remained a minority position, in part because the exposure of an actual skeletal
framework, especially of steel, invites problems with corrosion, differential thermal
movement, water and air infiltration, and the continuity of thermal insulation. Instead, it
is Sullivan’s attitude valuing formal expression above “truth in construction” that informs
most brick architecture in the early 20th century. For example, many of Wright’s early
projects, including the Larkin Building in Buffalo (1904), the Robie House in Chicago
(1909), and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1916), although nominally load-bearing brick
structures, were filled with hidden steel and concrete elements that allowed his formal
vision to be actualized.
Finally, a fourth trend combining the textural possibilities of brick-bonding patterns
with an interest in free-form massing and Romantic silhouette finds an analogue in
certain so-called Expressionist projects from the early 20th century: examples include
Michael de Klerk’s Eigen Haard and Piet Kramer’s De Dageraad housing estates in
Amsterdam (1917 and 1923, respectively), in which otherwise straightforward brick
facades are enlivened with curvilinear brick elements and decorative treatments.
Between the two world wars, brick was employed by a younger generation of
European modernists experimenting with new spatial concepts informed by notions of
Cartesian orthogonality and populated by interpenetrating planes and abstract cubic
masses. In particular, the early work of Mies van der Rohe, starting with his brick villa
project of 1923 and including his houses for Wolf (1925), Lange (1927), and Esters
(1927), as well as his monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (1926),
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attempted to reconcile these new formal attitudes with traditional brick-bearing wall
construction. However, more commonly, where load-bearing brick was present, it was
covered up with a smooth plaster finish, as in Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower in
Potsdam (1921), Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroder House in Utrecht (1924), and J.J.P.Oud’s
Kiefhook Housing Estate in Rotterdam (1930). In the United States, architects seemed
less interested in the ideological struggle between an evolving modernist aesthetic and the
use of traditional materials: brick was used as a primary cladding material in Raymond
Hood’s American Radiator (American Standard) Building (1923) and, combined with
stainless steel, in William Van Alen’s sumptuous Chrysler Building (1930).
After World War II, the use of brick, in both load-bearing walls and exterior cladding,
was revitalized by a new interest in raw materials of construction that could be expressed
in an aggressively straightforward manner. Of several such projects by Le Corbusier in
France and India, the most influential was his pair of houses, the Maisons Jaoul at
Neuilly-sur-Seine (1955), consisting of brick load-bearing walls supporting concretecovered—
but brick-faced—Catalan vaults. This so-called Brutalist aesthetic, in which
brick was juxtaposed against deliberately exposed steel or concrete structural members,
reappeared in buildings such as the Langham House Development at Ham Common,
London, by James Stirling and James Gowan (1958) and in several projects by Louis
Kahn, including the Phillips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, New Hampshire (1972),
and the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, India (1974). It is only with these
projects by Kahn that the traditional load-bearing brick arch was finally permitted to
enter the vocabulary of 20th-century architecture.
However, having been once let in, load-bearing brick, whether as wall, pier, or arch,
has had little further impact on 20th-century architecture. Instead, it is primarily as
nonstructural cladding that brick has made its presence felt, even within the Brutalist
oeuvre. Mies’s academic buildings at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), designed
at the end of World War II, used brick and steel as cladding over the actual steel framework:
the brick appears ambiguously as both in-fill within, and foundation for, an elegantly
detailed—but nonstructural—grid of painted steel. Yet the fact that the brick (and steel)
could be seen on both the inside and the outside gave the construction a perverse kind of
integrity, and it served as a role model for numerous other buildings, including the selfconsciously
Brutalist Hunstanton School in Norfolk, England, designed by Alison and
Peter Smithson in 1949.
During this time, brick cladding became an accepted part of the modernist oeuvre,
representing a compromise in which the historically resonant surface qualities of brick
were fully integrated within the modernist vocabulary of unadorned orthogonal planes
and cubic mass, of articulated solid and void. Kahn’s influential Richards Medical
Research Building at the University of Pennsylvania (1961), with its expansive,
windowless brick surfaces, spawned numerous derivative works, including Ulrich
Franzen’s Agronomy Laboratory at Cornell University (1968) and Davis and Brody’s
Waterside Housing in New York City (1975). Earlier, Alvar Aalto, in his Baker House
Dormitory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1949) and Säynätsalo Town
Hall in Finland (1952), made of the brick surface an even more explicit medium for the
play of sensuality, imperfection, and historic reference.
Yet this compromise proved unstable. In the latter part of the 20th century, references
to tradition involving brick, however stylized or ironic, became less constrained by the
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modernist formal aesthetic and more overtly rooted in historical precedent. A key
moment in the development of this Postmodernism was the Guild House in Philadelphia
(1963) by Robert Venturi. His axially positioned brick arch—nominally a load-bearing
form but here purposefully articulated as nonstructural cladding—acted like a s ign pointing
to an intellectual attitude about history rather than as an attempt at some kind of
reconciliation. James Wines and his group, SITE, produced a series of architectural
projects beginning in the early 1970s that used various characteristics of brick walls as a
starting point for an ironic integration of sculpture and architecture. This attitude, as in
Venturi’s Guild House, addressed brick forms not only as construction systems—SITE’s
use of “peeling,” “notched,” and “crumbling” brick walls was directed more at brick as
cladding and at the recent banal history of big-box retail design—but also as the classstratified
culture supported by such projects. That issues of class became intertwined with
the use of brick is illustrated as well by the so-called red-brick novelists in postwar
Britain, associated with the “red-brick” universities (not the older and elite “stone”
universities of Oxford and Cambridge), and the coincident phenomenon of Brutalist
buildings in which the deployment of brick was meant to invoke a kind of working-class
solidarity.
In a similar vein, American corporate Postmodern office skyscrapers of the 1980s
were generally clad with thin stone veneer rather than brick. Nevertheless, brick
continued to be widely used in Postmodern residences, schools, and related occupancies;
a building that typifies the genre is the condominium project on 70th Street, New York,
by Kohn Pedersen Fox (1987), in which a smooth, unadorned brick surface appears to
support stylized stone moldings and pediments that step back much like the New York
skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s. In Europe a far different Postmodernism emerged,
favoring a synthesis of classical and Platonic geometric elements within which the
Kahnian essence of brick—its weight, compressive strength, and solidity—were valued
and exploited. Aldo Rossi’s Burial Chapel in Giussano (1987) and Mario Botta’s design
for a private house in Vacallo (1989) serve as examples of this tendency.
Whether embraced, hidden, disowned, contrasted with more modern materials, or
coopted within a new aesthetic, brick has played an active role within the cultures of both
modern and Postmodern architecture. In contrast, so-called deconstructivist architecture
in the final decades of the 20th century has virtually ignored brick, reverting to the radical
modernist dogma in which abstract geometric surface and mass, the play of solid and
void, the iconography of machine and grid, and the “new” materials of glass, steel, and
concrete (or its nonstructural analogue, stucco) are once more combined, albeit in a selfconsciously
distorted and fragmented way. Characteristically, where deconstructivist
brick appears most famously—in Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Visual Arts
(1990) in Columbus, Ohio—it is as a fragmented and stylized archaeological
reconstruction of an armory denoting the site’s past history rather than as “the building”
itself.
During the course of the 20th century, as traditional loadbearing forms of construction
encountered new structural and environmental systems, as well as new functional and
spatial needs, and as traditional architectural paradigms encountered new forms of
aesthetic expression, the answers to the question posed rhetorically by Kahn—“What do
you want, brick?”—have shifted accordingly. That brick has continued to be commonly
employed as cladding in the face of competition from more modern and technologically
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sophisticated materials is evidence enough that its nonstructural qualities—reasonable
cost, flexibility, durability, impact resistance, and visual appearance—continue to be
valued.