Open Oculus

“The greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world”. I love it. Some may feel that James Howard Kunstler’s lecture goes too far in stating the case against unsightly vernacular architecture and ugly urban sprawl. But due to my personal bias on the matter, he can’t go far enough. The hideous urban and suburban hellholes I grew up in had no excuse for existing. They depressed and oppressed me beyond what I could express. Fortunately I didn’t feel the need to cope the way Kunstler’s little Skippy and Heather did. But come on, why do humans have to create such ugliness? What ever happened to “firmness, commodity and delight”? Oh wait, that was way too many centuries ago, in Rome, and who cares what Vitruvius thinks about architecture anyway? Well. I do actually. Firmness commodity and delight were an inseparable triumvirate to the Roman architect. No building passed muster unless it was a veritable testament to all three. Firmness: strength. Commodity: utility in terms of function. Delight: pretty obvious, it must provide aesthetic value. (Though “firmness, commodity and delight” are actually a translation and paraphrase of Vitruvius’s concepts from De Architectura, scholars feel they were much pretty right on).

But how do we go back to such an esoteric idea? Really, in America, main street architecture just comes down to dollars. If Wal-Mart’s moving in, they’re not going to care that the building and its acres of parking lots are an eyesore, an assault on the eyes and soul. In fact, isn’t that kind of the point? Hard not to notice a megalithic Wal-Mart, a savage auto-sprawl, the primary color clash and screaming plastic signage of the fast food joints. It’s one big Ugly competition. Whoever can be the most visually offensive draws the most victims—I mean customers. So there it is again, dollars. Look at the photograph on this page. So in ancient Rome, did they just have more money or more taste, or both?  And get this- the building was a prison, the Castel Sant’Angelo.  If the Romans could invest that kind of skill and artistry into their prisons, I think we might consider investing a little more into our civic spaces, our schools, our libraries.

But, oh heck, don’t cry. The ugly virus hasn’t infected all American architecture. We have our world class architecture. Our amazing spaces. Let’s start here: Libraries. I say, make them Extraordinary. Blow our freaking minds. If you haven’t already, check this article and slideshow of library architectural wonders:

Borrowed Time: How do you build a public library in the age of Google?

From the article, here are two snippet descriptions of what I feel characterize the best of American libraries (both interior and exterior) today:

“Salt Lake City’s public library goes one step further and adds a touch of the shopping mall. The architects, Moshe Safdie & Associates, made the focus of the building a skylit lobby-concourse, known as the “Urban Room.” Like Milan’s Galleria—the granddaddy of shopping malls—the dramatic space is a sort of indoor street, lined with shops. The library houses a cafe and a deli, a florist and a comic-book store, as well as an NPR station and a writing center. The book stacks and reference areas are on the left of the concourse; individual study carrels and reading nooks rise on the right. The result manages to be grandly civic and familiarly commonplace at the same time” (Rybczynski 2008).

“During the last two decades, many cities have grappled with this question and provided a variety of answers. One of the first—and the largest—was the Harold T. Washington Library in Chicago, designed by Hammond, Beeby & Babka in 1991. The interior was planned with stacks open to the public and large loft spaces for maximum flexibility—a bit like a department store. The lower levels contained such nontraditional spaces as a video theater and lending library, a gift shop, and exhibition spaces. But it was the exterior that made the strongest impression. The building incorporates many elements of 19th-century loop architecture: heavy stonework, arched windows, and decorative carving, as if Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and John Root had come back to have another go. The result, massive and monumental, is a slightly forbidding Fortress of Knowledge” (Rybczynski 2008).

These libraries are a haven, a community center, a third place. But even without architectural revamp and, oh, you know, the building of library movie theaters, I think today’s libraries can be that third place. This will mean something different for each community: allowing for chocolate chip cookie incidents because food is both sold and allowed, allowing for more noise because teens are gaming, toddlers are singing and seniors are playing Mah Jong, and also allowing for space for the quiet “Cathedral of learning” experience so persuasively written about by Garrison Keillor. The library can and should be everyone’s third place. As librarians, we can be facilitators of this by being idealistic, forward thinking, creative and tolerant. I’m sure “practical” fits in there somewhere too, but I’m also sure most librarian’s won’t have any trouble with that one. Maybe we need to be more careful about being “too practical” (i.e. Kunstler’s building’s which “make us feel like termites” or “look like DVD players”), hmm? For the short-changed of community center and architectural beauty, I hope more library interiors and exteriors can become transformative spaces.

Rybczynski, W. (2008). “Borrowed Time: How to Build a Public Library in the Age of Google.”Retrieved 11/15, from http://www.slate.com/id/2184927/.