The Dutch firm Mecanoo won the international design competition in August 2008, beating Foster and Partners, OMA, and five other practices selected from more than a hundred entrants. The result is impossible to mistake for any other library. A facade of interlocking aluminium rings, layered like industrial lacework, wraps a tower whose tiers cantilever outward as it rises. Inside, a book rotunda spirals upward through galleries that frame a vertical view from ground floor to skyline. The roof opens onto a discovery terrace and a Secret Garden, with views across the West Midlands. John Madin, who had designed the Brutalist Central Library this building replaced, criticised the new one before it opened, complaining that eighty per cent of its interior lacked natural light. Visitors disagreed. In its first year, 2.7 million of them came through the doors.

On the seventh floor, behind glass, sits a small wood-panelled room from 1882. John Henry Chamberlain designed the Shakespeare Memorial Room for Birmingham's first Central Library, all carved oak and Renaissance Revival detail. When that building came down in 1974, the room was dismantled piece by piece and stored. It was rebuilt inside the concrete bones of the next Central Library, then dismantled again when that one was demolished in 2016. Three buildings, one room. Birmingham keeps its promise to Shakespeare. The collection it guards is one of the most significant in the world, alongside the Boulton and Watt archives, which document the steam engines that made the city's fortune, and a children's book collection that runs to many thousands of volumes.

Within sixteen months of opening, Birmingham City Council announced it could no longer afford to run the library it had just built. Opening hours were cut from 73 a week to 40. Roughly half the 188-person staff lost their jobs. Visitor numbers dropped to 1.8 million in 2015, still good enough to make this the most popular attraction outside London. Some hours were later restored when the Brasshouse Language Centre moved in and helped share the costs. The library that was meant to redefine civic ambition became, almost overnight, a parable about what happens when public buildings outlast the budgets that built them. The books are still there. So are the people who come for them.

Underneath the building, a more modest miracle. Cold groundwater is pumped up from the aquifer beneath Centenary Square, run through the air-conditioning system, then returned to the earth through a second well. No refrigerants. No towers belching steam. The library cools itself by borrowing heat from the rock below, and the rock barely notices. Sustainable engineering at this scale was rare in 2013 and remains uncommon today. The library is also a quiet rebuke to the idea that civic landmarks must be wasteful. The same building that holds the Boulton and Watt archives, the patent papers of the men who tamed steam, runs on geothermal physics those men would have recognised.

The library shares Centenary Square with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, which it physically connects to and partly shares facilities with, and with Baskerville House, named for the eighteenth-century printer whose typefaces still appear on book covers everywhere. Stand in the square at dusk and the aluminium rings on the facade catch the last light, glowing copper for a few minutes before turning to silver under the sodium lamps. Then the building lights up from inside, its galleries visible from the street, books on display through glass. Birmingham gave itself this. Through austerity, controversy, and the architect's own quarrel with his successor, the building stayed open. Malala's plaque is still there at the entrance.