ABSTRACT
The days are gone when a public library, large or small, might be readily identified through its civic architecture, whether gothic, classical, Edwardian Baroque or neoGeorgian, and by its name chiselled in the external stonework. However well-regarded many of these older libraries might be today (because of their period architecture), they are usually thought to provide the wrong image for a modern public library – considered monumental, perceived as institutional, deemed old fashioned and, because of their fixed function characteristics, uneconomic to operate and change. They may now also be wrongly sited. Given the opportunity, librarians are often keen to desert the old – the Morgue of Culture, the Great Stone Face, the Stuffed Shirt (as Wheeler called them back in the 1960s2) – for a more modern ‘with-it’ building.
