Month: August 2016

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The Newly Renovated Boston Public Library

The front of the building has been opened up (it was largely admin before and concrete bunker-like things blocked the view). Now there is great lighting and windows.
In what seems like an engineering feat to my (naive) eyes, the structure of the walls inside the building has been opened up so you have a feeling of long lines and beautiful corridors. Some how it feels like there are far fewer walls (and I wonder what happened to the load bearing ones?)
An example of one of these opened up spaces. (Red is all over.)
On the downside, following a trend in a lot of libraries, shelves are half size (fewer books, better security I suppose) and the “bookstore” style signs “Romance” “Urban Lit” etc. turn me off. (Although I’ll note that all the books still have call #’s on the spines at least.)
In the head scratching dept., there is going to be a TV studio on the first floor of the library. Wasn’t quite complete.
Front entrance, obligatory touchscreens, sort of shopping mall/casino feel.
Still some books around! A cart near the Foreign language stacks, with Rimbaud in French a good sign.
This is a try at a panorama shot around the atrium. This to me is a 100% improvement on the dreariness of the old building, in which the atrium, despite Johnson’s intentions, always seemed like the central hall of a prison yard. This is all the more amazing in that it seems like it was mostly accomplished with lighting and color (there were fewer structural changes on the upper level as far as I could tell.) This is now a much more inviting space to read, write, and browse.
Did I mention red? There is a lot of it. Some full height stacks remain, but the inevitable question of how much they weeded the collection comes up.
There are big spaces for a children’s library and this room for teens (blurry photo through glass door, sorry). The area at right I think is trying to evoke a booth in a diner. I assume teens today would mainly need plugs to charge their devices and good wi-fi. Banana splits, bobby socks, and a wise-cracking soda jerk not so much.
As a contrast, here is the main reading room, Bates Hall, in the old building. I try to be as open to library 2.0 and beyond as anybody. Still if you say, “reading room” to me and this is what is elicited. Even though what I mostly have done here over the years is write.
And in comparison with the entry way to the new building, here’s the basilica-like front hall from the McKim. (The requisite lions are out of the shot, but rest assured they are on either side of you as you walk down the stairs.)

On one of my recent work jaunts to Boston, I checked out the nearly complete renovation of the Johnson Building of the Boston Public Library. First opened in 1972, the building was named after its architect, Philip Johnson, and meant to complement the McKim building, build in 1895.

The older building has been beautifully restored in all of its Renaissance Palazzo knock-off glory, now a less dingy and far more comfortable place to be. (The crazy Sargent murals are still in place on the top floor.)  But the essential dignity and grandeur remain.

The Johnson Building makeover was perhaps a harder case. The original building was a bit fortress-like in a 1970s style that isn’t much missed, with a giant empty atrium at the center (generally with painting visibly peeling off the ceiling window casements in my memory at least). That said, it worked well enough for me (and I’m a fairly intense library patron), had a good collection, but was not someplace I ever warmed to.

The redesign seems to be heading towards an answer to what a  future-friendly library might be. (Something that lots of places are wrestling with, as I’ve posted about, and we are about to get a big dose of in DC with the renovation of MLK Library at Gallery Place.) I don’t know any more than they do about what the future of libraries will disclose, but a few impressions above courtesy of an evening visit earlier this month, with cell phone snaps. Some beautiful things…others a little headscratching…

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Ordinary Lives

A couple of Commonplace Book Entries that resonate with one another across a century and a culture. Bertolt Brecht on the anonymous workers who drive history (but are forgotten) and George Eliot on ordinary lives.

Questions from A Worker Who Reads
Bertolt Brecht

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the name of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished.
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song,
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have even a cook with him?
Philip of Spain wept when his armada
Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
Frederick the Second won the Seven Years’ War. Who
Else won it?

Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?
Every ten years a great man.
Who paid the bill?

So many reports.
So many questions.

“Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters” in a translation by Michael Hamburger

From an interview with Prof. Simon Reader (could there be any better name for an Eliot scholar?) at the New York Public Library blog.

Q: The subtitle of Middlemarch—“A Study of Provincial Life”—seems to be a direct description of her project and her method: an almost scientific examination the everyday. Was this approach to fiction avant garde at the time?

A: Certainly. Eliot was one of the first major English novelists to be concerned with representing reality as it was, in a kind of documentary fashion, as unadorned as possible. English Realism had already existed earlier in the century with Jane Austen, as well as Thackeray, although he’s dubiously realistic, and Dickens—again, kind of realistic, kind of not. Eliot really held herself back from introducing any kind of overly romantic, or sensational, or supernatural elements into her fiction.  At the end of Middlemarch, she gives what could be construed as a thesis statement, saying “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” She’s trying to elevate everyday life, to elevate the life of the common person in all of their hidden obscurity, to magnify the value of small, ordinary actions.

And last, ordinary lives in painting (was looking for Millet’s “The Gleaners” but found Jules Breton’s “The Weeders”  at the Met’s site.)  Similar theme and style.

 

weeders_sized
Jules Breton, The Weeders, 1868

 

 

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