Materials

As you approach and enter the Peckham library you become immediately aware of the many different materials used. Stone, steel, concrete, glass, iron and plastic all clah violently with each other as you make your way up the staircase, one hand one the aluminium railing and your face turned orange by the plastic coating on the north face facade windows.

 

 

  The staircase is where the most diverse materials are displayed, done in a very naked style as if the architect wished to show all the many materials and structures that make up the building. Unlike the very uniform facade of patinated coppar, the staircase itself is concrete with glass ornaments and supported by giant steel beams visible above your head. Separating the stairs is a metal net, a miniature version of the same kind as found on the outside                                                                                                                       .

  

The L-shaped building is covered in copper on all surfaces exposed to weather except the nortern side, while the inside of the L is covered in a metal net that from a distance resembles sheets of canvas hanging from the ceiling and wall. The net acts both as ornament and protection agains vandalism.

 As you enter the library, the naked materials of the staircase are replaced by the opposite. A warm red rug greets the visitor when you step onto the third floor and stretches across the library floor. The walls are painted a creamy white, with light seeping in around the edges of the ceiling through a gap between the ceiling and the wall.

The three large blobs that seem to inhabit the library as giant insects are clad in light-coloured wooden squares that have been stapled onto them, giving it a look of being sewn together. One can easily associate them to big wooden huts or ancient inuit canoes. They reinforce the homely atmosphere created by the rug and the many books that together serves to dampen any noise that might be made.

Inside these blobs, or pods as the architects call them, are quiet areas, a meeting room, and a childrens playroom. The quiet area is situated directly beneath the domed skylight, and as you ascend the spiral staircase leading into to it, light becomes another material separating the area from the rest of the library.

Though it retains the red rug and white walls, as well as he same chairs and tables as below, the way you are introduced to a new quality of light lets you know that you are now entering a very different space. The tables have been arranged around the edges of the pod, making the person who enters from the stairs feel clumsy and alien until he or she sits down at one of the tables and becomes a part of the circle of people reading quietly there.

 The contrast between the inside and outside of the library section is a central theme throughout the building. Inside the library is all soft materials that invites you to relax and stay a while. Outside the library, as in the elevator and bathrooms for example, everything is naked metal and rubber, pushing you to move on a quickly as possible.

On the forth floor, the bathrooms are bathed in light tinted by the coloured plastic sheeting on the north face facade, giving the room an entirely artificial light quality.

The building does a very good job of ushering you to the fourth floor and to the library where you are told by the materials to stay and read or enjoy in some other activity available there.