The great glare of London has long eclipsed Britain's other cities. Birmingham, a central England canal-laced burg of about one million people, has been trying to make itself visible through totemic architecture and public landscapes. Since the 1990s, the gradual development of Brindleyplace, designed by Towns-hend Landscape Architects, has refreshed the Birmingham canal waterfront with a mixed-use quarter. A number of signature buildings have appeared, the most famous of which is the amoebic disco ball of the Selfridge's department store by Future Systems (2003), part of the large commercial redevelopment of the adjacent Bull Ring market. There are also the Cube, an enormous mixed-use development by Ken Shuttleworth of MAKE (2010), and the newly opened and immense Library of Birmingham by Mecanoo (2013). Each employs the tactic of screening a building's excessive bulk in stylish cladding, with varying degrees of success. Now the revitalization focus is moving slightly northeast, to Paradise Circus, a round open space that in this case is encircled by a ring road. It's hardly paradise. This geographic center of the city is clogged by the inverted ziggurat of the now-vacant 1974 Brutalist central library by architect John Madin. The library was the only piece of an underfunded late-1960s master plan that was ever built, so it looks completely out of place and makes Birmingham seem to be a city in two halves. It will now be demolished, despite vigorous efforts toward its preservation by groups such as the Twentieth Century Society, which calls the library a "building of international merit which has a direct visual relationship with nearby listed council buildings and monuments."
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