Swiss Cottage Library was designed to look like an open book [George Rex]

IT is considered to be a masterpiece among London’s civic buildings by architecture buffs, a landmark library skillfully designed to look like the pages of an open book.

But council officials are concerned for the state of Swiss Cottage Library – a creation of the late Sir Basil Spence in the 1960s – after one of its famous fins was found to be cracking.

The Town Hall has now hired repair work consultants, Atkins, to try and work out the true condition of the library in Avenue Road.

The likely final bill for protecting the grade-II listed building is not known at this stage, as the first step is exploratory works and the drawing up of a sensitive repair plan.

Sir Basil’s design features a series of “fins” but Camden found in April that one was “badly damaged” and all of them needed investigation.
While the fins were designed to look like the leaves of a book, they were actually also an ingenious method of controlling how much sunlight shone through the windows on library users as they tried to read.

Atkins has advised that a repair plan is speedily put in place, warning that colder weather this winter will lead to “further deterioration”.

Its report said that “the concrete fins and connections were showing signs of weathering and cracking associated with corrosion of the underlying steel reinforcement.”

The ‘cigar shaped-building’ from above [Berelly]

It added that there was “wholesale cracking across the concrete elements”.

Sir Basil, who died in 1976, designed a series of iconic Modernist buildings and is also known for Coventry Cathedral and the University of Sussex campus.

The library in Swiss Cottage was originally part of proposals for a new civic centre for the “Metropolitan Borough of Hampstead” but the wider works were abandoned with the formation of Camden Council in 1965.

A swimming pool was constructed at the same time as the library, but this was later demolished during the controversial development of the Swiss Cottage open space and the creation of the new leisure centre which is in use today.