“The universe (which others call the library)” is the opening line of one of Jorge Luis Borges’ best-known stories. “The Library of Babel” strides straight into the equation of the library with the known world. For Borges, the library was a cipher for knowledge and for the human mind itself. The semi-mythical library at Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy in 260BC, was said to contain all the knowledge in the world, written on more than half a million scrolls.
Similar claims are now made for the internet: that ultimately all information (note the change from knowledge to information) will be stored electronically and be accessible at the touch of a key. For now, though, we still need books. Google anything with a whiff of intellect and it will direct you to a bookseller’s website or a bibliography. Our current, absurdly random, searches remain a world away from that idealised cyber-library - until books are surpassed, we will need libraries.
In an increasingly commercialised and privatised civic realm, libraries remain the most public of public buildings. In a seemingly extraordinary twist of fate, just as their demise is being prophesied, so library building is enjoying one of its greatest and most wilfully eclectic periods. With a radical megastructure in Seattle, the home of information technology, a new monument in Alexandria and a slew of sleek and architecturally sophisticated reinterpretations of that seemingly most moribund and dreary of buildings, the municipal library is arguably the most vibrant area of contemporary architecture.
What we are seeing is a major shift based on a radical rereading of our relationships with books and with information. The internet has seen knowledge (or at least information) break free of architecture. Where there is a terminal, a laptop, or a BlackBerry, information flows - yet the book, the journal and the newspaper survive and, in some case, thrive.
With every new technology come the jeremiads - every new advance entails the death of the past. “The book will kill the edifice... “ proclaimed the archdeacon in Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, “ ...printing will destroy architecture.” The cathedrals of Quasimodo’s era had been stories in stone, mountains of graphic and sculptural information for the illiterate masses. The Reformation encouraged reading of the Bible and the abandonment of the Latin mass, and, as it did, the art of reading architecture was lost, as completely as the knowledge of Alexandria. But architecture survived.
Libraries will survive, too, not only because books will always be there but because they are pivotal centres of the community, the last bastions of the public realm and, crucially, because they are symbols of democracy. No society can be truly free unless it makes not only the knowledge of the surrounding world but also its own records available to its citizens. Library architecture is, and always has been, a symbol of the way society views itself - or would like to see itself.
The library developed from the big Babylonian warehouse, storing clay tablets through the decorated columbaria of the classical world, in which earthenware jars holding scrolls were stored in wall niches. With the collapse of Roman civic society the responsibility for manuscripts fell to the Church. This shift from secular to religious is fundamental, because the holy texts - the raison d’etre of these libraries - were holy of themselves. The cathedrals of the middle ages held books in secure carrels, which developed into the familiar unit of desk, chair, shelves and window in which St Jerome appears in Renaissance paintings - and which is as applicable to sitting at a terminal as it is to reading a book.
Libraries returned to the secular realm with the establishment of universities. With the Renaissance the familiar library halls emerged, although with the books chained to lecterns in the aisles, and the memory of the book’s spiritual value survived. The advent of the printing press from the 16th century made books more available and more plentiful. Rather than the few hundred sparse volumes of even the biggest institution, private libraries could contain thousands of books. With this new abundance, books began to line, to obscure and to subsume the walls, so that the structure appeared to be the spines of thousands of volumes.
The new libraries were built on the word, on language and literature. The Enlightenment reinforced the importance of learning, the authority of reference books (Johnson’s Dictionary, Diderot’s Encyclopedia) and the arrival of the novel. It also reinforced the library as a symbol of democracy, with access for all.
In the visionary designs of Etienne Louis Boullee for a French Royal Library (1785), the library interior became a structural terrace, a huge volume of volumes dwarfing toga-clad users, like cells in a huge brain. The logical step from here was to use the mind itself as the model. The dome, representing both cranium and the infinity of the heavens, became the omnipresent motif. The twin engines of 19th-century library design, the British Museum Reading Room (1854-57) in London and Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale (1865-68), were based around domes. These rooms celebrated knowledge but also national identity - nationhood through text and literature. The British Museum Reading Room was a perfect sphere of knowledge at the heart of the world’s greatest museum. It was the culmination of a notion of an ordered world, of catalogued exhibits and books, a grand survey from an imperial perspective.
Modernism smashed all that. Modern physics and science, increasing specialisation and a rejection of the imperial narrative led to a more fragmented and organic architecture. The domed, circular reading room implies a knowable world, centred, finite and complete, viewed from a single privileged point. With Modernism and Post-Modernism that confidence broke down. Hans Scharoun’s free-flowing Berlin library, begun in 1967, was a reaction to Prussian and Nazi stolidity, and to the symmetrical perfection of earlier libraries; his is a new world view of books as liberating, not containing, of text opening up new perspectives. Sir Colin St John Wilson’s complex and wonderful British Library, Britain’s first major new public building since the early 1950s, somehow managed to develop these notions despite inconceivable adversity; though Paris’s new Bibliotheque Nationale has returned to a more rigid symbolic realm, its impractical hothouse glass towers standing like open books at the corners of an imperiously raised plinth.
The extraordinary new Central Library in Seattle ups the pace. A huge building with enormous civic presence, its architect, Rem Koolhaas, has built a structure that competes with the mall in terms of scale and theatre. The circulation through the glass structure spirals upwards past bookstacks containing 780,000 titles, working through the Dewey Decimal System as it goes from 000 to 999 - it is literally built around the classification of books. Koolhaas presents us with the library as a marketplace for knowledge, what he refers to as “the last public institution”, but infected with the aesthetics and ideas of corporate capitalism. He conceives the building as a space of competition between the different types of media.
The structure is both a critique of contemporary urban space (setting up, as does the mall, internal streets, plazas and marketplaces) and eloquent riposte to reports of a death greatly exaggerated. It is a parasite, the last outpost of social responsibility juxtaposed against its corporate neighbour, Microsoft, and the semi-dysfunctional US downtown.
In London, David Adjaye is also playing with the conflict between public space and corporatisation, via an exercise in branding. He is creating a series of “Idea Stores” in Tower Hamlets, the plan being to reintegrate the libraries of one of Britain’s poorest boroughs into its teeming streets. By placing the new buildings in prominent shopping centres and using the language of retail, it is hoped libraries will again become centres of community as people are seduced into Adjaye’s sleek, thoughtfully designed spaces. These new libraries become communication centres: e-mails can be sent, contacts kept, advice given. The library attracts people by offering web access and DVD rental, and hopes to smuggle in books almost by stealth. The success of the first Idea Store in Bow, designed by Bisset Adams, suggests the approach is working; the second in Whitechapel, by Adjaye, is almost complete.
Abalos Herreros’ exquisite Usera Library in Madrid is one of the finest of recent years. It uses thick shutters to close out the bright light that appears like open books, while the irregular slot openings in the facade are placed to resemble the spines on a shelf. Meanwhile, the world-dominating architects of Tate Modern, Herzog de Meuron, recently completed an extraordinary library in Cottbus, Germany with an amorphous plan. This is the diametric opposite of their rational library in their native Basle, in which a web of photos and press cuttings combines to create a powerful, complex facade, screen-printed into the concrete and glass.
McCullough Mulvin Architects, based in Dublin, have built two sophisticated libraries at Trinity College and Waterford, both intelligently integrated into the historic urban fabric; while Rab Bennett’s recently completed Brighton library represents a rare successful PFI initiative. Even old Alexandria has an updated, if slightly cheesy, library, a hieroglyph-coated cylinder designed by Snohetta of Norway.
There is perhaps no other field of architecture displaying this blend of intense activity and intellectual and aesthetic achievement. Yet, unlike art museums or theatres, libraries rarely become the kind of icons that attract what has tediously become known as the “Bilbao effect”.
Questions are always being asked about their future. What form will libraries take? Will they still be here? Perhaps these are the wrong questions and the concern is misguided. In the UK, spending on libraries has increased in recent years. Although the number of book issues is slowly falling, the number of library visits has risen (currently 323 million a year). This suggests that libraries remain important. And they survive as places of free resort - there is no pressure to consume. For the old, the lonely and the derelict there is an equality and a dignity to be found in the library that cannot be found elsewhere. It is crucial to preserve these most public places. In a country with a rotten climate and negligible culture of external public space, libraries become piazzas - more about people than about books.
But the most frequently asked question is that prompted by the information revolution. Panic sets in as we begin to believe our own hyperbole about computers destroying our need for human contact - surely libraries cannot survive the online onslaught? It is easy to forget that in its 3,000-year history the library has already adapted to extremely diverse forms of media - from scrolls to illuminated manuscripts, from books to newspapers, through microfiches and on to CDs, each of which would have been a culture shock to the previous generation. What is happening is that as our libraries become more dependent on IT than on books, our interactions are increasingly being made through cyberspace, not physical space.
Cyberspace is nowhere - it is the ether. To compensate, the library must be made into somewhere, and that task falls to architects. It is an irony that at a time when books are being marginalised, library buildings are becoming more important. In our increasingly privatised, commercialised environment, the library is growing in status as the final outpost of knowledge (versus information), public (versus private) and real (versus cyber) space. In a post-industrial age all that is left is information. If that information is power, libraries should be power stations, not dreary municipal outposts - they need to fulfil Borges’ vision as the mirrors to the universe.
