Libraries should be a part of life Just down the road from the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of the new Library of Birmingham. Like a 196ft Lego ferry that has come adrift in the middle of our most landlocked city, it is way more ostentatious than I was expecting - particularly the gold funnel and doily metal latticework covering it. It seems to come from the school of bling architecture that the city has embraced since the arrival of the Selfridges building, which still looks to me like a giant sequinned jelly mould. Commissioned before the recession and the current purge on spending, the new library has been designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo and will open to the public next September. I'm glad so much investment is going into a project that is not a shopping centre. Danny Boyle is right that our cities need more than Wetherspoons and Walkabouts. But in order to join the new building up with the rest of the city, the existing Central Library, built in the Seventies, is closing for good next June and will be knocked down. Local architect John Madin's brutalist ziggurat has been much maligned, and was condemned by the Prince of Wales as a carbuncle, but it was the centrepiece of Birmingham's post-war, futuristic vision of itself as a democratic utopia. History - or rather, urban blight and some fundamental misunderstandings of human behaviour (we don't like underpasses much) - didn't bear that dream out. Madin, who died last year, would probably argue that his plans were only half delivered - the library was meant to be clad in marble, not concrete, for example, and to have an underground bus station. Childhood nostalgia informs a lot of the debate around libraries, and as someone who was born in the year that the library was opened, I feel a deep emotional attachment to it. With a café, McDonald's and at one stage a Hooters pub by it, and an amphitheatre out front that was perfect for boy- and girl-watching, skateboarding and fag-smoking, the library was one of the places to hang out. As if by osmosis, you would find yourself wandering inside, zipping up floors on escalators, getting lost in its quiet, mysteriously shady corners, pulling out odd books and or unknown CDs. You never had a sense of its monumental size from the ground, so it wasn't intimidating or overbearing in its importance, unlike some of the grander, older libraries I studied in at university. It wasn't separate or special, but part of everyday life - and it didn't cost anything. Rightly, it's the second most visited library in the UK. London has learnt to embrace its modernist architecture, particularly the Barbican and the Southbank, but rather than accept and remake a critical period in its history, Birmingham is once again tearing it down as if in shame. I hope the new library is as cherished as the old one, but for me there will always be a tragically gaping hole in the fabric of the city. Ominously, standing next to the new library is a vacant building, the Thirties Baskerville House - deemed a "good" piece of architecture, but seemingly without purpose. Culture and learning thrive where people live their lives, next to Wetherspoons and shopping centres, not separated from them.