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

23 страница из 72

I should add to the elements of beauty, material. In this the next choice after cost, should be appropriateness and possibilities of dignity and quiet beauty. Nor need the material be expensive. Expense does not always promote beauty; it often ensures ugliness. A good rule to follow is to take “the wine of the country,” as it were,—the stone of the state. Not necessarily stone, either. Unless in large libraries, why is not wood good exterior material, if the life of the building is likely to be only twenty-five years? Wood is a fine material for a small building, lending itself to easy alterations or repair, and capable of great beauty. Whoever has had the fortune to sail on Christiania Fjord or Puget Sound has brought away, as pictures of loveliness, a memory of the beautiful villas of those forest-rich shores. Even re-enforced concrete, with its vast possibilities of ugliness, has also possibilities of beauty: witness the business section of Leipsic, and the residence quarter of Hamburg. The different sections of America have various handsome and durable building stones. And every section is near enough to clay to have good brick,—by far the most sensible, and in good hands the most beautiful material for library building. Did you ever see the buildings of Harvard University? If so, you retain now in memory, not so much the gray granite of the library, as the soft, homely, beautiful, wholly satisfactory atmosphere of old Holworthy. If you can escape the bilious brick which just at present is considered æsthetic, and the other brick which exudes soda-blotches, and get the good old-fashioned kind which mellows to a ripe old age, you will please a large constituency.