Building review Norwich Forum 1998–2001: millennial prospect, coincident detachment

Abstract

This study of the development of Norwich Forum examines its realisation within the framework of the Millennium Commission. Replacing the Central Library of 1963, destroyed by fire in 1994, Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library, located within The Forum, is characterised by Michael Hopkins's tempered high-tech architecture and an ambivalent relationship between public and private sector provision. Idealistic claims of a modernising kind, put forward in a provincial context, remain, as they were in the 1960s, responsible for paradoxical aspects of the building sited adjacent to an ‘historic’ city centre. The move from paternalistic postwar welfare state provision to that conditioned by the expectations of a millennial ‘experience economy’ is explored in examining the conceptual agenda for the new building where a contextual propriety is still pervasive. In spite of being underwritten by the rhetoric of regeneration, and the logic of Hopkins's rationale, coincidental qualities condition the presence of the library.