Architecture

Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.

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Peckham Library

An upside-down L on stilts in bright green copper, and the Stirling Prize winner of 2000.

ContemporaryYou can go insideFree

Photo by No machine-readable author provided. Mcginnly assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Alsop and Stormer put the library at the top instead of the bottom. The building is an inverted L: a tall thin leg of stairs and lifts, and the reading floors cantilevered out above a covered public square, held up on splayed steel columns that look far too thin for the job. The skin is pre-patinated copper, a green nobody expected, with the word LIBRARY in orange across the top and coloured glass down one side. Inside, three plywood pods shaped like nothing in particular hold the children's library, an African and Caribbean literature collection and a meeting room. It won the Stirling Prize in 2000 and it is still a working branch library.

Where
122 Peckham Hill Street, SE15 5JR
Nearest station
Peckham Rye · 6 min walk

Library hours; the building is free to walk into.

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