A Little Bizarre

Standing atop the impressive new central library in Birmingham I felt like I had been transported into the future –the kind of future that one was given to believe twenty or thirty years ago in illustrations of how cities would look in 2000, 2010 and beyond. Then, I was captivated by images of flying cars, curved buildings in the clouds and futuristic design. So I was rather disappointed when the future "arrived" and things were, by and large, pretty much the same as they were before –certainly seldom as dramatic in style as our past claimed they would be. But occasionally one does get a glimpse of such an environment, where visionary designers and architects have embraced the future dreams of the past and created wildly exciting buildings. Birmingham has the surreal new Bullring building, and now its grand central library. Here, on one of the roof terraces, one has tremendous views of Britain's "Second City", but at the same time there is the feeling of being in a garden or park. Apart from the unusual wall decorations the thing that fascinated me most was the contraption for cleaning the windows. My imagination saw it as a kind of mechanical praying mantis, a strange robotic sentinel lurking in the grass and looming over passers by. This fanciful but benign image delighted me, especially the little hole that creates a eye in the creature's "face". Location: Birmingham, England