the hand and eye. Whether deliberately or subliminally, our shelves take on the character of great internal facades; our somewhat careless piles by nightstands and on studio tables become urban master plans to navigate like parodies of pop- culture leviathans when we make our way to bed or work. In this dormant condition of an archive, on shelves and stacks, arranged in piles, walls, or enfilades, they still communicate – conveying ideas [and humanness, vis a vis intellectual curiosity and manual craft] in space. The proximal relationships between spines produce conceptual rebuses, constellations of interests, curiosities and ethics. In this way, rooms with books are perpetually refreshing, since each volume usually carries both the story between its covers and, more intangibly, of its time or purpose of acquisition… the presence of dust or signs of ultraviolet exposure sometimes further marking temporal history or the enduring power of influence. All of these manifested qualities, independently and certainly when assembled in concert, are so arresting, it begs the question of how architects would not be drawn to books, as media… as design objects in their own right? We will move our favourite specimens – amassed, culled, and curated – across continents, in checked luggage on planes, in cartons packed in moving vans. What we choose to keep surely bears some higher meaning and value… · I say all this at least in part from a place of self-indulgent introspection: for I recognise the habit in myself. While I am a staunch advocate of public libraries [I’m certain I have to be – both my parents worked in libraries at one time, and I spent most of my childhood in them], I’ve gradually accumulated a loosely curated and generously loaned collection of print artefacts over the last two decades, at first, and primarily, of things you couldn’t find in your average community institution. It has grown slowly, like an amateur gardener’s indulgent unruly hothouse, and I have moved it halfway across the country three times – its storage cartons usually exceeding the volume of my other, comparatively stoic, inventory of domestic belongings. On the one occasion I had to store my things during an extended period of transience, it was my books that I missed most, like an extension of self and the way I had always imagined a phantom limb must feel. It was only with their eventual retrieval that home felt like Home, even though I’d settled into a flat months earlier.
Linda M Just
Books thus physically manifest the qualities praised in architectural design -- they are tactile, and their sensory engagement prompts a visceral response, perhaps an unnameable feeling of attraction or repulsion. Consider public responses to Brutalist buildings: whether the source of the feeling is readily evident or not – whether the feeling justifies the criticism when the building functions well – and the parallel drawn here becomes more obvious. The tooth of the card stock covers, endpapers, and signatures; the soft relief of typeset on the page; the smell of the ink; the contrast of colour composition in layouts; the diegetic structure of its contents; even the typographic choices, blank space, and margining; all these seemingly small decisions can impact user/reader perception of a story through balance and form, albeit subliminally. Even at the macro-scale, as an object with agency and exerting Thing Power, books have an appealing tectonic parity: they lend themselves to rational assembly, scaled to
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