Architectures of Knowledge: Designing the Library
28 Aug 2023
For centuries, the library has mediated knowledge by providing space for its storage, retrieval, and exchange. How can this mediative nature be discussed in architectural terms? And how, given the dramatic shifts in our production, consumption, and attitude towards knowledge, might the library be evaluated today?
Described by architect and writer Michael Spens as the ultimate ‘repository for social values,’ the library is a key interface, a contact point, between an individual and their broader social and cultural field. This fundamental condition of the library as the border space between worlds – real, instructive, or imaginary – has manifold spatial consequences. As social historian Ken Worpole comments:
Libraries operate on the boundary between the secular and the sacred, between the archival and the exploratory, and between upholding the irreplaceable tradition of the book whilst embracing new media and technology…. The library has to imbue all its spaces both with a sense of pluralism as well as universality.
In accommodating these various oppositions (one might add conservation/interaction, focused research/chance encounter, materiality/ephemerality to Worpole’s list), the library must provide both a wide range and a specificity of experience for its users. It has, as a result, become an architectural form that is acutely aware of its own function as a mediative space; it is always, like the very act of reading that it facilitates, on a ‘boundary between.’
Claims made for a library’s mediative spatiality, though relevant to a broader discussion of how knowledge is encountered, risk abandoning the library building itself. A space characterised by liminality is still designed, built, and used; discourse surrounding the concept of the library should not eclipse the more practical questions of accessibility and navigability (not to mention funding) that are essential to its daily functioning. Altogether, the library architect must produce a coherent, legible space that considers a library’s specific collection and the community that it serves. So how, given these philosophical and practical concerns, can we discuss and evaluate these architectures of knowledge?
Full article: Architectures of Knowledge: Designing the Library | +Plus Journal