University of Aberdeen New Library, Aberdeen, Scotland. photo © Schmidt hammer architects k/s 2012
This is on the radar looking nice and pretty like an incandescent cuboid Zebra, but I want to take a minute to procrastinate and rant about what a truly terrible library it is.
- Most importantly, there’s a massive hole in the middle. There is a hole in the middle. There is a hole in the middle. There is a hole in the middle. Which not only means less floor space, but that noise from the café on the ground floor (where there is hardly anywhere to sit) travels - very loudly - to the top floor, landing at and picking up all the noise from the subsequent floors on the way.
- There are three bathrooms on each floor, all of which are uni-sex and pretty gross.
- There are only 3 lifts, one of which is invariably broken and results in queues which extend outside during exam time (now).
- They ordered the wrong kind of glass and didn’t realise until they had finished, (come on) so now it’s going to be like a greenhouse during our week of summer.
- It’s a library made of glass built in a place known throughout the UK as the Windy City, second to Chicago obviously. (It was closed on Sunday, because of wind.)
- It has a massive hole in the middle.
Fast Blood, Frightened Rabbit
Friday, £5, first 300 people on the door. Nice break in between exams.
Train home.
Removing yourself from any place or thing feels like a betrayal at first, and then the wounds close and the guilt only flares up in rainy weather. After I threw a penny into the Fontana di Trevi, I knew I would eventually return to Rome. When I do it will not be returning home or to some ideal of a fixed state; it will be a revisiting of what once flourished and then crumbled. We are better off different than we were yesterday.
- Kara Vanderbijl, from the beautiful Charades
There is no sun until it sets.
