Outrage

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1997 by Peter Davey

Vancouver is one of the most splendid cities in North America, It takes advantage of an amazing natural site with a picturesque harbour and backdrop of mountains, it has fine parks and, most importantly of all, it has a living city centre. There is very little sign of horrid contrast between parking lots that look as if they have been left behind by an air raid and glossy tower blocks a characteristic of so many cities over the border in the USA, even otherwise graceful Seattle, a hundred miles or so to the south. And Vancouver is building lots of apartments down-town, not just for rich people from Hong Kong, but social housing as well: the city is truly urbane and full of life.

So it is unfortunate that when Vancouver decided to rebuild its public library, it chose Moshe Safdie's precast miniature of the Colosseum which looms rather threateningly from a down-town block. Why, when building an institution devoted to civilisation and learning, choose as a model the Colosseum - a place devoted to bloody destruction and the gratification of humanity's basest instincts? Why, having chosen it, decide to ignore the only dimension in which the Roman building is noble its tectonic qualities - and create a thin and but somehow aggressively bland pastiche? It almost seems as if Safdie decided that those hicks in British Colombia deserved a little culture but that he could not quite find the energy or budget to bring Rome to the North-West Pacific. This is particularly sad when the city contains a masterpiece of Modern public building: Arthur Erickson's Law Courts, nearly 20 years old, but still dignified yet welcoming, the model of a democratic palace of justice gracefully inserted into the city's heart.

Inside, the library is rather better and more gentle than the exterior suggests. A sunny top-lit arcade sweeps round the south side of the building providing a new enclosed urban space with little shops and cafes on the outer (curved) side. These are faced by a completely different elevation across the public space. This is the library itself, which is a comparatively simple, modest, rectangular building completely concealed from the outside by the overblown cardboard stage set. Perhaps there is something to be said for working from inside outwards after all.