Civic locus: From galleries to libraries; Do libraries contribute more to civic life than galleries? Trevor Boddy considers their role.

'These days, architects are desperate for art gallery commissions--but
libraries are a richer, more public-centred, less elitist building
type.'
John Patkau, co-designer, Grande Bibliotheque du Quebec

Looking at the range of library buildings collected in this issue of the AR, John Patkau's assessment seems pertinent. Architectural culture has been influenced by architecture critics over-publishing and overpraising art galleries during the past decade or two. The 'Bilbao Effect' has become bilious, and I, for one, will be quite happy never again to hear mock-sculptural, self-conscious halls for contemporary art referred to as 'the new cathedrals'.

It seems evident that the building that will come to emblemise the beginning of a new century of public architecture is not the latest kunsthalle by Hadid, Holl or Herzog & de Meuron, but rather Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Central Public Library (AR August 2004). The library--especially the North American public lending library--is a particularly populist building type, uniquely serving all classes, all ages, and all education levels. The Seattle building fulfils its library functions admirably, but it is trailblazing for its take on public space, and through this, the idea of public architecture. Within its zig-zag shell, Koolhaas' library proposes a range of public spaces that hilly, jammed-out downtown Seattle never got around to building. Its levels provide niches for scholars, corporate researchers, bibliomanes, teen-daters and even the homeless seeking refuge from the rain, and this building's propositions for the 'civic' are shared by most of the libraries gathered on these pages.

Art galleries are seldom 'civic' in this sense. One way or another they are zones of contemplation, a key reason galleries are handed out to assertive form-makers like Frank Gehry, to those predisposed to metaphysical claims like Daniel Libeskind, or to architects pumping cyber-methods to inflate a favoured range of organic forms, like Asymptote. It is telling that a more recent round of gallery commissions have gone to safely button-down Neo-Modernists like Taniguchi at MOMA, Brad Cloepfil's Allied Works Architecture (the renewed Seattle Art Museum, New York's Huntington Hartford Museum), and Herzog & de Meuron (the San Francisco De Young Museum and many others.)

Repositories of civic life

In terms of architecture not sculpture, libraries are more interesting places than galleries, not only because of the broader range of people who use them, but because they are places of work. And as mental work is what most of us do these days, we hanker after public spaces to enrich the task. Both the Koolhaas and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson's Ballard library (p76) featured here were funded by the same $200 000 000 voter-approved bond issue, and Seattle librarians beam with pride when their facilities are described as the biggest Starbucks in town--filled as they are with laptop-gazing clients doing symbolic analysis in comfortable surroundings.

The recent round of North American mega-libraries--which include John and Patricia Patkau's Montreal Bibliotheque (p72)--were strongly promoted by the business class in their respective cities. Collections of paper have proven surprisingly useful to knowledge-based businesses, despite--some say because of--new-found ease of access to electronic information. The boosters who insisted previously that even the smallest North American city build their own convention centre, have now turned to lobbying for major libraries. David Chipperfield's bold new construction for a failing downtown Des Moines, Iowa (p56), demonstrates just how far libraries have come to prevail as the civic construction of the moment, and to some degree, definers of democracy. Even in the heartland, American librarians' refusal to release lists of clients' book borrowings made them the first key group to resist homeland security legislation.

The buildings in this issue are shaped by two historical traditions in library design: the repository and the public lending library. The great ancient library at Alexandria and those that followed in Chinese and Arab cities were storehouses of information; scrolls, tablets and books protected as rare possessions, not tools of active use other than for a tiny class of scholars whose work was more conservation than publication. Medieval libraries and those in the great aristocratic houses of Europe were extensions of this tradition, which culminates in the national legal repositories of the nineteenth century, updated most recently by Colin St John Wilson's British Library (AR June 1998) and Dominique Perrault's Bibliotheque Nationale (AR July 1995).

Renzo Piano's addition to New York's Morgan Library (p46) is in this tradition of aristocratic storehouse, but it is worth noting that his additions render it more public--with a light-filled interior piazzetta, and a polished new theatre for music and lectures.

Lending urbanism a helping hand

The public lending library is perhaps the most enduring and important of Benjamin Franklin's many inventions. As great equalisers, their purpose was to move books out of the door, not hoard them like jewels. Andrew Carnegie's funding and his squad of Boston architects spread the building type around the continent, and to some degree, around the world, though it is sobering to note that Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers' 1976 Pompidou Centre contained France's first public lending library.

The two American lending libraries presented here are squarely in this tradition, both of them unusually open to view from streets, as they are about the transparency of civic institutions as much as they are about the conservation of fading volumes. Both Ballard and Des Moines libraries make significant contributions to enlivening the urban spaces around them. Aglow with copper mesh laminated within its windowpanes, Chipperfield's prismatic forms will have a public park grow up between their angular arms, amplifying the civic good works up to the scale of the block in a downtown that has too many empty blocks. The generous throw of the Ballard roof not only permits the earnest plantings there that have become almost de rigueur in this tiny corner of Cascadia, but also creates a needed public space sheltered from the rain. Much more so than grass fields up top, lively, integrated urban communities are the best conservation strategy going.

While the concept of neighbourhood branch libraries may have Anglo-American roots, some of their finest architectural expressions these days are in Spanish-speaking countries. Under former Bogota mayor Penalosa, Colombian maestro Rogelio Salmona designed several branch libraries whose social brief was nothing less than the reintegration of communities rent by decades of civil war--by means of the civility of library functions, and the visuality of his corbelled brick forms. Like the American branch libraries featured here, Josep Llinas' Biblioteca Jaume Fuster (p64) functions as a multimedia, multi-functional public hub on the Placa de Lesseps in the Barcelona neighbourhood of Gracia. Like Chipperfield, the seeming arbitrariness of Llinas' forms masks a considered urbanism--with its roofline echoing the blocks of houses that march up the hill behind it. As for BCJ's Ballard, the generosity of the Barcelona roof creates a welcome sheltered zone and visual definition for the piazza. A city is the aggregation of many similar small acts of public-mindedness. Libraries like these build the civic.

Trevor Boddy is the architecture critic for the Vancouver Sun.