Slides That Follow Your Voice: Jamaican Accent Award Acceptance

Slide 1: The Port Carrow library

0:17Thank you. Thank you very much. Please, I have three minutes and I have a list, and the list has my mother on it, so sit down. [laughs]

0:26When the committee called, I was on a roof. Not a metaphor, an actual roof, in Port Carrow, checking the uh, the fixings on the library we're here to talk about, because a storm was due on the Thursday and I don't trust anyone's fixings, including my own. I thought the call was the engineer. I said, if this is about the bolts, I have seen the bolts. There was a pause.

Slide 2: I was on a roof

0:52Then a very polite woman told me we had won the Civic Design Prize, and asked whether this was a good time, and I said, from the roof, that it was a wonderful time, and that I would call her back when I was on the ground. [laughs] I did call her back. Forty minutes later. By then she'd told my office, who'd told my mother, who'd told the whole town, so when I got to the ground the lady in the shop at the bottom of the hill congratulated me and gave me a mango. So that's how I found out, properly. From a mango. I had a point. The building. Yes.

1:30So let me tell you about the building, briefly, because it's the reason we're here and not me.

Slide 3: A library for about 360 days, a shelter for 5

1:37The Port Carrow library is fourteen hundred square metres on a hill above a town of nine thousand people. It is a library for about three hundred and sixty days of the year. For the other five, it is a shelter. The reading room holds five hundred, sorry, six hundred people on mattresses. The children's library has a kitchen behind a wall that folds away.

2:01The roof is a concrete shell, one hundred and eighty millimetres thick, tied to the ground with forty-four anchors, each tested to a pull of twelve tonnes, and the windows are one point two metres above the floor, which looks like a design choice, and is, because that's the height the water reached in nineteen eighty-eight.

2:23We never, I mean, it was never just us, we never... We did not design it alone. We spent seven months in that town before we drew a line. The fishermen told us where the wind comes from. The headmistress told us where the children would hide.

Slide 4: Seven months in the town before we drew a line

2:40A man called Mr Beckford, who is eighty-one and has sheltered in three different buildings in his life, told us that in every one of them the toilets failed first, and that if we got the toilets right he would excuse the rest. We have eighteen toilets, on their own tank, and Mr Beckford has forgiven the rest, Beckford has forgiven the rest, you know, more or less. [chuckles] He wrote to me about a door handle in March. It's fixed. No? Okay.

3:09The building has been used as a shelter twice. The second time, five hundred and forty people slept there two nights, and on the third morning the library opened again, books dry, because the books are upstairs, and upstairs was drawn by people who'd been told exactly what water does.

Slide 5: The second storm: 540 people

3:32I want to thank the committee. I want to thank my partner, Delroy, who did the structure, and who is the reason the roof is a shell and not a prayer. I want to thank the people of Port Carrow, who taught us the building before we drew it.

Slide 6: Thank you

3:47Sorry, I've lost my page. The, um. My mother. Yes. And I want to thank my mother, who is here, who sold her car in nineteen ninety-six to pay for my first year of architecture school, and who has asked me, every year since, whether the car was worth it. [sighs] Mum, I think so. I think tonight we can say so.

4:12A last thought. Awards are for buildings that photograph well. But the photograph I keep is one a librarian sent me, of the reading room at six in the morning after the second storm, full of sleeping people and one small boy who had found the book he wanted and was reading it by torchlight, in the middle of all that.

Slides 7-8: Awards are for buildings that photograph well / The reading room at 6 in the morning

4:34That's the building. Delroy is telling me I'm over. Delroy, you have never finished a structural calculation on time in your life, so. Good night. Thank you.