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Mills of your mind Last month saw the installation of the first distinctive cladding panels on the facade of Dutch architect Mecanoo’s Library of Birmingham, facing the city’s Centenary Square. The circular filigree panels, which act partly as solar shading to the curtain glazing behind it, are formed of 5.4m black
aluminium rings, with silver 1.8m silver rings interlaced within them, and are supposed to evoke Birmingham’s industrial past of ‘gasometers, tunnels, canals and viaducts’ – although we think its more evocative of an architecture student let loose with a Spirograph set during a pre-crit caffeine frenzy.
Due to open in summer 2013,
the library will have 10 storeys, one below ground opening out into a large rotunda in the square itself.
At the top of the building, another rotunda – the city’s Shakespeare Memorial Room, part of the original library – will be reconstructed in its full Victorian splendour with a viewing gallery looking out over the city. CK
Et tu, Brutalism? Marking the 50th anniversary of its construction, Sheffield’s Park Hill defies its fate this month with the opening of part of Egret West and Hawkins Brown’s refurbishment. In the city dubbed the ‘Rome of the North’, 995 flats were constructed
RIBA JOURNAL : SEPTEMBER 2011
on the 32 acre estate by Sheffield Council on one of the city’s seven hills, in one of the most ambitious post-war developments of its time. Thirty years later the estate’s Brutalist concrete form came to epitomise the failure of social housing. To commemorate the anniversary, developer
Urban Splash is opening four show flats in the £36.5m block, which in June 2012 will see 75 refurbished flats go on the market, together with new commercial units installed at lower levels, engaging with the new landscape strategy being designed by Grant Associates. CK
EZ does it The government has promised a second wave of enterprise zones in England, with others likely to follow in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. EZs are often regarded as the very spirit of Thatcherism, introduced the year she took office and driven by the political ideology of supply- side economics. In fact Democratic senator Robert Kennedy espoused it in 1967, and it was adopted here by left-leaning planning guru Peter Hall in the mid-1970s, building on his ‘Non Plan’ study of 1969 supported by Cedric Price and Reyner Banham. Not so Thatcherite, perhaps. This time round the EZs are in places deemed to have ‘growth potential’ rather than simply social and economic deprivation as previously. However, the British Property Federation has warned that though welcome, this latest tranche may have insufficient incentives. And property consultant Cluttons reminds us that in the 1980s, ‘High profile successes such as Canary Wharf sat alongside the less impressive zones in Glasgow and the North of England.’ HP
KEITH COLLIE
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