Our wonderful new revamped Library has been opened to the public for almost a week now, and already it feels like half the city has paid a visit – I bumped into one person who said that already this was their eighth visit, and they had to come again because they had run out of books to read. What a marvellous problem to have in a city!
We (Wellington), are an erudite population on that basis, beating off the likes of Auckland and Christchurch with a stick. Our city has fought long and hard for this result – as long and as hard as Christchurch fought for the retention of their Town Hall, where the people of the city had to fight tooth and nail against the Fat Controller: the Terror of TinyTown, the Right Honourable BullyBoy Brownlee, who wanted to simply demolish the Warren and Mahoney masterpiece that is the Chch Town Hall. Thank goodness the town did not submit there, and thank goodness also that we did not submit here either. Really, leaving your city in the hands of non-architects is always a risky business.
Like you readers, I’ve been following along the process of the potential demolition / great saving / ultimate remediation of the Library, and so this week, after many years hard work, we get to enjoy the benefits. The issue was not that the building suffered damage, or was going to fall down when it was closed, but instead an overly cautious bean-counter’s view of the world, that once they were told that it had potential weaknesses, then they had “no option” but to close the whole thing down, or even demolish and rebuild. Luckily we have a number of hardened campaigners who were not going to take that decision lying down, including architects (thank you to the cast of thousands!!), engineers (thank you Adam Thornton!), former City Councillors (thank you Helene Ritchie!), and probably many book readers as well (thank you all of Wellington). Hooray to you all for turning this ship around and getting the Council to restore it instead of demolish it. Bravo! Thinking back to that day many years back, I don’t think that aanyone dared to put their head above the parapet and say: “Knock it down”, although there was a lot of muttering from the Gov / Council that “Christchurch has a groovy new Library, why can’t we have one too!?”.
The architects, originally, were Athfield Architects, and they were renominated once more, this time working in a partnership with a Te Ati Awa / Tihei rep, Rangi Kipa, ensuring that the revised building has a more solid iwi connection to the land. The engineers, despite a brilliantly persuasive discussion on strengthening many years ago from Adam Thornton, was ____ ? Was it Holmes? And contractors were of course Naylor Love ? Or was it LT McGuiness? Whoever it was, yes, they have made a brilliant job out of it.
It is surprising to me, however, that so much of the building looks exactly like it was before – has the HVAC system been replaced or is all the ducting just the same ones, finished with a fresh coat of paint? Thankfully the tired old “fluffy clouds” of sound absorbtion blanket have been ditched, and the thousands of newly welded brackets holding the concrete floor planks in place have at long last been covered by a nice new white ceiling.
One thing that is stridently new and definitely not there before however, is the giant criss cross columns reinforcing the building, painted a bold reddish brown throughout the floors, and appearing like a jungle thicket on the ground floor. A plethora of posts. A concubine of columns. A zig full of zags. Enough columns to keep everyone happy, even the most seismic-averse people amongst us.
On the opening day, as many of you know, there were several thousand people queueing up to get in, while I went along a few days later to capture some photos. I hope I was not too late. More to come !
