Читать книгу How to plan a library building for library work онлайн

13 страница из 72

ssss1

Our own “library age” may be said to date from the middle of the nineteenth century. The parliamentary investigations which led to the first English library act in 1850, and the organization of the Boston Public Library with us in 1852, mark the beginning of the modern library movement. I will not try to trace the gradual evolution of library buildings abroad. I do not know enough about it to handle the subject well. I find, however, in Edwards’ Free Town Libraries,[10] London, 1869, a prototype of our own “Points of Agreement among Librarians on Library Architecture.” But as late as 1907 an English architect (Champneys[11]) says that “the examples of what a library building should not be are out of all proportion to those which are worthy to be followed.”

In America, building developed with the library movement, at first getting rather ahead of it. Indeed, there were few experienced librarians to direct it, and even these were mainly the old style conservators and bibliographers. The topic of building does not appear in the discussions of the library conference in 1853. The architects had to develop a precedent. The first distinctive type to appear was adopted in the Astor Library in New York (1853) and followed in the Boston Public Library dedicated in 1858. The exterior of the building had no peculiar features, but the interior was distinctly a type to be outgrown. The main room was a lofty hall, surrounded by galleried alcoves reaching to the ceiling, storing the books, while the readers occupied the floor, into the middle of which the main stairway arose among the tables. This impressive but wasteful interior was copied in large cities throughout the country, and was referred to in contemporaneous discussion as the “conventional style.” As it was tested in operation, and as its defects both for storage and administration became evident, the library profession, then getting together, unanimously condemned it. At the Cincinnati Conference of 1882, the A. L. A. resolved that “the time has come for a radical modification of the prevailing style of library building, and the adoption of a style better suited to economy and practical utility.”[12] At first there was no agreement on a successor. Richardson, the great architect, developed a library type which was severely criticized by librarians.[13] But in the rapid growth of libraries, the problem of close, economical and accessible storage of books became acute. How could these accumulating masses be stored and at the same time used? The solution came in the “stack,” at first fiercely fought by conservative librarians, but now so universally accepted as to form the distinctive feature of modern American library architecture.