ABSTRACT
Birmingham has recently unveiled a radical and contemporary new City Library. It is a forceful collection of horizontal slabs, a dynamic concrete and glass ziggurat wrapped with a filigree skin of metal circles. At the pinnacle of the building is a shining golden cylinder, and contained within this, the tiny orthogonal Shakespeare Memorial Library. This intimate barrel-vaulted room is lined with highly ornate Gothic bookcases that house the city’s collection of Shakespearian literature. This small but significant interior space has been painstakingly transferred from the City’s School of Music to act as ‘the icing on top of the cake’ within the deliberately flamboyant post-modern landmark building. But this is not the first move that this tiny and intricate chamber has made, neither is it the second, but it is actually its third different transposition for the room. And so, this golden space occupies a special place in the consciousness of the collective memory of the city. It is not uncommon for elements of a building to be removed from one location and reused in another. An ornate doorway or fireplace is a valuable commodity; whole screens, elaborate windows, even timber panelling have been transported to a new place, but whole rooms have a much less anonymous quality, a more direct relationship between the different users and by virtue of their completeness, a much greater impact when relocated. This chapter will explore the notion of the itinerant element; it will look at a number of examples of the reuse from individual segments, components or Spolia, to the recycling of a complete single chamber, hall or bower and it will examine the position of the peripatetic element or space within the collective memory of the population.
