Architecture Update: Literature loses out to politics

LOCAL authority politics in Swansea have taken a bizarre turn over the proposed national centre for literature. Will Alsop won the competition to design the building in February. Now a combination of local hostility to the avant- garde architecture and problems over ownership of the site has led to the design being scrapped. Instead, an existing 19th-century building is to be refurbished.

The Arts Council, co-funding the project, was expecting a design at the leading edge of contemporary architecture. The spurning of the Alsop design could now lead to a problem with funding the project.

In a letter to the local council, Alsop has written: 'The winning of the competition was cause for celebration. The resultant indecision since winning is a cause for extreme depression. I hope the events of the festival (a national literature festival that would have coincided with the opening of the first phase of what promised to be a landmark building) will not suffer in a similar way . . . I urge you to make some positive moves, otherwise there will be no building and no festival.'