'Jam factories', they used to call them. Long before the modern variants of architectural insult ('academy for secret police', 'alien spaceship', 'prison' etc) the 'jam factory' put-down was applied to various modern civic and cultural buildings in brick. Most notable of these was Elisabeth Scott's Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon, which opened in 1932. I've wondered if there was an actual prominent jam factory somewhere to which these buildings were being compared. I suspect not. Why jam, anyway? Why not chocolate, or baked beans? The new Lambeth Palace Library by Wright and Wright (RIBAJ, November 2016) is a bit of a jam factory on that curious basis, then. Its hand-made brick laid in various textures is rather better than the inter-war examples and includes 'Bishop bond', a recessed cruciform pattern, and the use of random blue headers: both of these are nods to the old palace. It has the equivalent of a blocky fly tower, the relevant paucity of fenestration, the merest touch of restrained glamour in the lofty foyer, even the cast-iron rainwater hoppers and downpipes that you saw on Scott's theatre. It has duly attracted some criticism from the keyboard warriors who like to reach for their architectural analogies ('like a railway signal box' was the oddest) generally homing in on its industrial look. As in the jam-factory era, the objection always seems to be that the building in question does not look like what it is, but something else which should be somewhere else. As if everyone instinctively knows what a museum-conservation grade archive building by a river in the vicinity of a medieval ecclesiastical complex should look like.
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