reading architecture 2
by hector abarca
‘The universe (which others call the library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.’ So begins the ‘Library of Babel’, the short story by Jorge Luis Borges compiled in Ficciones (1941-2, 1944, 1956). The library is the storehouse of all knowledge, there are no answers hidden in the endless hexagonal reading rooms. Artists and architects like Erik Desmazières (whose etching illustrates the cover of the 2000 English edition), Cristina Grau, Antonio Toca and Enrique Browne, in distinct places such as Paris, Madrid, Santiago and Mexico City have tried to transfer into drawings its description, finding their delight in slight variations in the text of every different edition of the story, helping to give them a better architectural representation. Toca pointed out that a final slight correction, the addition of just one word, would help him to produce a set of accurate architectural drawings. However, and it seems that Borges, who was aware of Toca’s attempts, purposely didn’t want to give the architect the satisfaction of materialising his infinite dreams, keeping it in the fictional world. The use of Borges’ metaphor is widespread, from Shirley Neuman, former dean of the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Arts at the opening ceremony of the Koerner Library in 1997, to a better known example in the labyrinth-like library of the Ligurian abbey where Umberto Eco’s Il Nome della rosa takes place, where Jorge of Burgos, the blind librarian is none other than the very same Borges who, ‘like all men of the Library (…) have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues.’
Hector Abarca
above: Powell’s Books in Portland. left: The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.
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