A missed opportunity

A bit of a complaint, but also out of undisguised envy. In 1993, or rather, at the time when the new university library building was being built in Warsaw, the Maitland Robinson Library, designed by Quinlan Terry, was completed in Cambridge. A beautiful classicist building, looking the way a library should look. Noble and friendly.

Terry in his design referred to the style of the first buildings of Downing College, erected in the years 1807-1812 by William Wilkins. It is to be regretted that the designer of the Warsaw library did not reach for the classicist traditions of the Warsaw university, but decided to build something anonymous, a building that could have been erected just as successfully anywhere in the world. Everywhere, meaning nowhere. A cross between the Pompidou Centre and the prison in Alcatraz.