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| click images for larger view |
In our digital age, where more and more knowledge is “in the cloud” and
local governments veer towards bankruptcy, what does the future hold for
the neighborhood library?
In Chicago Mayor Rahm
Emanuel's first budget, nearly half of all the layoffs came from the
staff of the Chicago Public Library. Hours of operation at the systems
76 branches had previously been cut from 64 to 48 hours a week. Rahm
pruned it even further, down to 40, with Monday now a closed day.
By this summer, just two
years later, many of those hours had been restored, and Emanuel was
cutting the ribbon on the CPL's 80th branch library, inside the new Back
of the Yards High School, heralding it as the future of the system even
as, the following week, he was announcing a major new standalone
library for Chinatown. Before we talk about the branches in part two of
this series, we're going back downtown for a look at the central
libraries that are at the center of the neighborhood networks.
As a word,
library is inextricably tied to the idea of knowledge through the physical objects of its conveyance:
librarium, Latin for "chest for books", derived from
liber, for paper or parchment.
Bochord, old English for a horde of books.
Librairie, old French for a collection of books. And, of course,
adormirebiblioteca, old Italian for the place where students sleep.
So you'd think the death of the book would mean the end of libraries. Except you'd be wrong, for at least a couple of reasons . . .
A. The idea of what a library is is in accelerating re-definition.
B. Like Mark Twain, the book may be destined to expire, but, for the moment at least, reports of its death are highly exaggerated.
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| Library of Birmingham, England (photo courtesy Mecanoo) |
Ambitious new central libraries continue to be built. One opened in
Madison, Wisconsin in 2010. Ground broke for a new $120 million central library in
Austin, by Lake Flato Architects, this past May, and just last month, a massive new $294 million central library opened in
Birmingham, England, designed by the Dutch architectural firm Mecanoo.
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| 1897 Chicago Public Library, now the Chicago Cultural Center |
Chicago
came to its own terms of what a central library should be a long time ago, back in the
1980's. The previous decade, the administration of Mayor Richard J.
Daley had kicked the main library out of its long-time home in Shepley,
Rutan and Coolidge's elegant 1897 people's palace on Michigan Avenue and left
it to find makeshift quarters in an old Mandel Brothers warehouse
behind the Equitable Building, about where the Gleacher Center can be
found today.
After Mayor Jane Byrne considered housing a
new central library in Holabird and Roche's terra-cotta clad former
Goldblatt's Store on State Street (now DePaul Center), her successor,
Harold Washington, committed to building an entirely new building at
State and Van Buren, and held a competition for its design.
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| model, Murphy/Jahn entry to Chicago Central Library Competition |
Against striking modernist entries
from the likes of Arthur Erickson, Dirk Lohan and Helmut Jahn, the city
decided to board the short-lived Post-Modernist express by picking the entry from Hammond, Beeby and Babka . . .
. . . traditionalist both in design and in being not especially curious
about where, functionally, libraries might be headed in the future.
(Other than in creating a handsome Winter Garden so separated from the
library, itself, that it seemed less a public amenity than a revenue
strategy for wedding rentals.)
And so it was left, not
to Chicago - the city that prides itself on cutting-edge architecture
- but Seattle, to build the first major structure that actually tried to
imagine the library of the future.
Designed by OMA's Rem Koolhaas and
Joshua Prince-Ramus, the Seattle Library included everything from avatar
guides . . .
to mixing rooms . . .
living rooms . . .
a continuous book ‘spiral’ . . .
. . . and a meeting room corridor as red as the inside of a beating heart . . .
The
jury is still out about how much Koolhaas and Price-Ramus got right. The Seattle Library was designed before e-books and the iPad, before
Bezos laid waste to Borders, but its design drew upon decades of
thinking - through competitions, speculations and, yes, books - about what library architecture
could be. In Chicago, that kind of innovation has been left to places
like the Helmut Jahn-designed
Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago, opened last year.
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| Mansueto Library (left) Walter Netsch's Regenstein Library, 1970 (right) |
After
easing long-time Chicago Public Library Commission Mary Dempsey out the
door with his draconian cutbacks, Rahm Emanuel appointed 37-year-old
Brian Bannon
as her replacement. Bannon actually got to see the evolution of the
new Seattle Public Library firsthand. A Washington State native, he was
a manager at the Seattle Library. He was mentored by City Librarian
Deborah Jacobs even as she worked with Koolhaas and Josh Ramus in developing
the concepts behind the Seattle's ambitious new library. In 2006, Bannon moved
on to San Francisco, where he managed that city's 27 neighborhood
branches and oversaw $200 million in upgrades. In 2011, he became the SFPL's
chief information officer.
Bannon's technology focus quickly made its
stamp on the traditionalist Harold L. Washington. This past July, in a space previously hosting a viewing area for a video on the library's
history, something called
The Maker Lab debuted, offering free workshops, demonstrations and open-lab hours for a 3-D printing facility.
Next
. . . Part Two: The evolution of the Chicago Public Library branch and
its architecture, and two very different bets on its future.
Read More:
Robots take over - from diapers.com to Helmut Jahn's Mansueto Library at the U of C
Settling for Less - The Road to Chicago's Harold L. Washington Library
Sleekness in Seattle - OMA's new Seattle Public Library
