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In front of the Forum, a grand new civic centre funded partly by the millennium commission and set alongside Norwich city hall, is a free-standing panel announcing the unmissable presence of this pounds 63.5m millennium project. Sadly, the final "m" is missing from the sign. Open just four weeks, it has become a "millenniu" project.
The Forum, a building for all seasons and nominally for everyone, is a covered public square that houses Norwich city library, now called the Millennium Library (the original stood here until it burned down in 1994), studios and offices for Radio Norfolk (as yet unoccupied), the city's tourist information centre, a careers and adult education service, an army of security guards, a shop selling essential Norwich memorabilia (chocolate fudge, novelty thimbles, natural wood whistling pencils and small pottery badgers), and the overpowering smell of cappuccino and pizza. Norwich's library is a particularly fine and extremely busy example of the species, but pride of place in the Forum has been given to a branch of Pizza Express and an Italian cafe.
The milling people, bustling shops, milky cinnamon smells . . . there was a moment, climbing one of the grand open stairs at the heart of this extensively glazed, horseshoe-shaped forum, when I thought I was in an airport terminal. I expected to find signs to departure gates. But I think I can be forgiven - the modern airport terminal has, along with the shopping mall, become the principal inspiration for modern public buildings throughout the world, from museums and art galleries to universities and libraries.
The Forum, designed by Michael Hopkins and Partners (architects of the Mound pavilion at Lord's cricket ground, the new-look Glyndebourne opera house and Portcullis House, Westminster) is a heroic if ultimately flawed attempt to create a dignified public meeting place to satisfy complex and contradictory needs and desires.
But perhaps it would be better for a library to...