ADRIAN GOLDBERG'S BLOG
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact

HALFWAY TO PARADISE

24/4/2016

0 Comments

 
Like any great city, Birmingham is a restless, organic creation.  Its latest revolution involves the unmaking of Madin - John Madin, the Modernist architect responsible for the city's uncompromising Central Library, hailed by some as a Brutalist masterpiece, reviled by others as a concrete monstrosity.  

Whatever your view, the location dubbed Paradise Circus - where the library stood as a centrepiece and a counterpoint to the Victorian splendour of the Town Hall, the Council House and Art Gallery - has always seemed like something of an oxymoron.   Paradise, it wasn't.

For one thing, the scheme was never completed to Madin's specification - the library should have been clad in Travertine marble, but when the money ran out in the early 70's it was left standing in all its naked concrete glory.  

Plans to relocate the city's central bus station from Digbeth were also shelved, leaving a gloomy and sometimes threatening walkway linking the civic quarter to the more modern prospect of the Rep Theatre.

This dank precinct came to symbolise Birmingham's blundering town planning, and although it was later given something a makeover, it's transformation into a downmarket shopping mall did nothing to rouse the spirits.  Only the dossers who slept rough in its more obscure corners will miss it.

So, to 2016, and the re-invention of the area - a scheme so vast that it's causing months of traffic diversions and delays in the city centre.  Madin's library - with it's "inverted ziggurat" that made it look larger at the top than the bottom - is being swept away, along with all that surrounded it.

Paradise lost?   Hardly.

The development that replaces it - according to images posted around the site - will shimmer with glass and steel, as new office blocks and retail units muscle in.

Only time will tell if this is Paradise Regained.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    ​Radio, TV and podcasts

    @bylinetimespod 

    @TheLiquidatorP1

    Film maker

    CV - BBC 1 Watchdog, 5 Live Investigates.

    goldbergradio@gmail.com

    Archives

    September 2022
    April 2019
    March 2019
    January 2018
    December 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    September 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    October 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014

    Categories

    All
    Music

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.