below: montage of symbolic spiral forms storing information set within a expressionless container.
Notes:
eighteenth century, and in a highly limited manner, that the author became legally recognized as the originator of his or her works (in England 1710; in France 1793; in Prussia 1794)’. (Hesse, Carla. ‘Books in Time’ in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. pp 21-36 (21).) 7 Examples include: Library of Congress (1897), Prussian State Library (1914), Stockholm Library (1928). Segregation in plan: British Museum, Bibliotheque Nationale. Segregation in section: Labrouste’s Bibliotheque St. Genevieve (1843-1851). 8 Despite this symbolic rupture, there were also many practical advantages to having books below grade; deliveries could be made with ease at road level and both temperature and humidity could be controlled with more accuracy than at higher levels. 9 Leopoldo Della Santa’s book Costruzion e del Regolamento di una Pubblica Uni- versal Biblioteca , published in 1816, was seminal in marking this separation between readers, books and staff. In his concept sketch for the new library, Della Santa excludes the large circular reading room as a prophecy of the modern library. 10 Edwards, Brian with Biddy Fisher. Libraries and Learning Resource Centres . Boston: Architectural Press, 2002. p14 11 Other examples include Sheffield Library (1958) and more recently Phoe- nix Central Library (1995) 12 Heathcote, Edwin. (2005). ‘A turn-up for the books’. Financial Times . (3) (June 10). 13 from Vidler, Anthony. ‘Books in Space: Tradition and Transparency in the Bibliothèque de France’ in Representations, No. 42, Special Issue: Future Libraries (Spring, 1993), University of California Press. pp 115-134
1 Edwards and Fisher state: ‘The text of the building and the text of the books within, shared a common ideal. The formal organization of architectural space and the space in the mind liberated by the power of the written word became symbolically united. It is this symbiosis which led to the domed reading room – itself a metaphor for the human brain’. (Edwards, Brian with Biddy Fisher. Libraries and Learning Resource Centres . Boston: Architectural Press, 2002. p9) 2 Examples of centrically planned libraries include Hawksmoor’s Radcliffe Camera Library at Oxford and William Chambers’ Buckingham House (1766-68). 3 It is for this reason that Isaiah Berlin affirms the legacy of the Enlighten- ment as monism and of Romanticism as pluralism. 4 Brawne, Michael. Libraries: Architecture and Equipment . New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970. 5 For instance, novels such as Richardson’s Pamela , Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise and Goethe’s Werther’s Leiden , reflected a growing trend towards individuality. See: Goode, Luke. Jurgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere. Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2005. Habermas also acknowledged this shift towards subjectivity. See: Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989 [1962]. p49-50. 6 As stated by library scholar Carla Hesse: ‘Indeed, while the Renaissance elaborated a new discourse celebrating man as creator, a discourse, which contributed to the social elevation of the artist and the intellectual, it was not until the eighteenth century that the author was recognized in Western Europe as a legal entity. And even then s/he was not seen as the proper creator of his or her ideas, but rather as a handmaiden chosen by God for the revelation of divine truth. It was only slowly, over the course of the
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archives and museums: On Site review 20
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