Matter Matters

A Major Study presented to the Department of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University in part fulfilment of the regulations for the Diploma in Architecture.

Statement of Originality This Major Study is an original piece of work which is made available for copying with permission of the Head of Department of Architecture.

Signed ‌............................................................

Georgios Makridis

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Matter Matters Georgios Makridis

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Abstract Matter Matters is a discourse on the implications that derive from the change of the form of information from physical to digital. As soon as the latter has begun to proliferate into the contemporary lifestyle virtual relationships have been created as equivalents to the physical ones. Thus, the existence of physical spaces as the grounds for incorporating events is being challenged. Consequently, architecture is presented with the challenge todefine ways to protect the places that it has been providing for ages, and enable them to mutually co-exist with virtual spaces.

An exploration of physical libraries becomes the vehicle to approach the theme.

Findings from the studies of libraries are combined with theory from affiliated domains to create the component with which the discussion will evolve. Handwritten journal notes are overlaid with photographs that were taken during the visits or downloaded briefly after them. The montages were made on a tablet computer to record the experience of the places during or briefly after the visits.

Historic milestones by Wright, architectural positions by Mitchell and Pallasmaa, as well as philosophic and theoretical contribution by Nietzsche and Calvino are the ideas which are discussed. The outcome will promote social networks as the motive force for the thriving of physical spaces and the presence of people as the means for sustainable architectural events.

Several agendas run through the body of Matter Matters. Exformation, i.e. the relevant and consistent information, is promoted as the means to deal with the management of attention. The fl창neur is used as the protagonist of this venture and is preferred to the rambler, i.e. the English translation. Both represent the urban stroller who is interested in glimpses and curiosities. However, the first is the reference of an era which is more relevant for the themes that are presented in the study. Individual thought is also part of the discourse. The interest to this bears on the belief that it can become the main ingredients of collective knowledge, in the instance it is intersected with social networks. The path from data to wisdom requires the socialisation of knowledge to be fulfilled.

The scope of the study is to comprise the incipience of future negotiations that will pursue the constitution of an informed society. The latter is considered fundamental for the sustainable progress of the human species.

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Contents Statement of Originality Title Page Abstract Contents Acknowledgements Dedication Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Prologue Chapter 3: Matter of Fact Stone Age Tribes Hellenistic and Roman Years Innovation, Order and Practicality Visions Reality Bi-polar Binaries Chapter 4: What’s the Matter?

Hyper-links and Search Engines Brain Malnutrition, Context and Time Information Flood Content as the Remainder From Data to Wisdom Contemporary Context The Role of Architecture Progress Chapter 5: Reading Matter The Rise of the E-pub (-lication) The Physical Dimension of Information Space The American Paradigm United Kingdom Libraries De-localised/ Specific Libraries The Library as Gender The Library as Assistance The Library as Attitude The Library as Identity The Library as History

1 3 5 7 9 11 13 19 27 31 31 33 35 36 37 55 56 57 60 61 63 65 67 70 73 79 82 83 85 87 90 93 97 98 99

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The Library as Culture The Library Genre Analogy Chapter 6: Matter of Interpretation Urban Relationships Aspirations The Position of Architecture Elements of Position Trail Induction Effusion Relevance Organisation Poiesis Matter matters List of References List of Illustrations

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103 105 106 149 154 158 159 160 162 162 163 163 163 164 164 173 183

Acknowledgements I should like to thank my tutor, Dr. Igea Troiani, for her constant help and support during the time this Major Study was prepared and written. I am grateful for her remarkable ability to work with someone whose native language is not English and for her very special way of reading in between thoughts and words. The discussions that I had with Igea have been the most enjoyable moments in this final year of my studies. They were of valuable input regardless if their theme was specifically the Major Study or if their subject was philosophy, theory or life. Most of the times the latter provided material for the study as well. If it was not for Igea, the result would not have been the same.

Professor Mark Swenarton has provided useful remarks at the beginning of the study, William Firebrace took the lead for a brief yet informative period of time, and the Head of Department of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University, Matt Gaskin, had commendable contribution at the final stage of it. I am bound to them for their support.

I owe a lot to my colleagues at the School of Architecture for their zeal to provide comments and suggestions. To my group for the Major Study, Louisa, Ian, Taufiq, Matt and Michael, I should like to express special gratitude for their interest to my work during tutorials and critiques. It is certain that all of them will make a difference to the way architecture will be thought and practised in the future.

Colin Priest has been my mentor for five consecutive years and has contributed a great deal to my approach on and my perception of the architectural discipline. It would not be an exaggeration, if I noted that Colin is responsible for many of the qualities that I enjoy about architecture. Along with Carsten Jungfer, they have encouraged me to take part to all of the critiques of their design unit as an alumni.

I have gained valuable knowledge from the work of the students and the tutors of Unit A. I shall always be grateful to them, as I shall be to Bruno Silvestre who had invited me as a critic to several presentations his own unit had. Drawings that I have produced during the time Bruno and Simon Henley were my design tutors are part of this Major Study.

I am not sure where this is going but I am perfectly aware of where it has started.

Meropi and Stelios, mother and father, any words would be inadequate to describe

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what you have provided to me and no matter how many times I say “thank you� it will still be not enough. Your unconditional love and continuous support has been the motive behind my persistence to keep going.

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To Euterpe who has been all the Muses together for me and who has been the bright star that I could follow in the times I was lost

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1 Introduction

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Introduction

Information is the juxtaposition of data to create meaning (Wright, 2010, 10) The most cunning and curious Musick (sic), is that which is made out of discords (Heywood, in Wright, 2010, 144) Information can be gestural. It may also be verbal. The stimulation of any part of the sensory system can be regarded as information. The evident fact is that the more humans progress, the more information begins to manifest in alternative forms. As soon as innovative forms appear, they start to compete with the longestablished ones. The latter rarely disappear. The tendency is to enrich the current ones. Digital technology is the latest addition to the gamut of innovations related to information. As such, it has contributed new characteristics to it. The change in the form of information and the resolute alteration in the way that it is accessed, retrieved, documented, and perceived defines the area of study. The legacy of the digital revolution and its implications in the lives of people is the subsequent and unavoidable focus. There exist moments in the history of the human species that have left indelible passages on what humanity takes as granted today. Moreover, there are terms that were introduced in the course, some of which have never ceased to oscillate ever since, and ideas that existed from the beginning and persisted no matter the cost. The contemporary situation is not a mere referential of a new media. On the contrary, the Internet is part of the continuity that the evolution of humans implies. There are definitely other elements that are affected by, and affect the equilibrium. The material world has been paralleled by a digital substitute component. Since they represent the same society, there are connections between the two. Consequently, there is a constant flow of elements governing the connections. The latter may include relationships, events, and, obviously, the spaces that encompass them.

The portal through which architecture enters the flux is defined by the designed setting and its context – material, or immaterial. The degree to which the flow toward virtual equivalents threatens the existence of physical manifestations, and the emerging counter-fight for the protection of the physical outline the intention, as well as the significance of the study. Libraries constitute the focal point for exploration, as they are both described by information, and endangered by its change of form. If people still need libraries, then there have to be reasons for that, as well as the means with which the institution is going to be aligned with

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Chapter 1

the realm of the contemporary. The elements that constitute the means are sought through their architecture and its contents. Libraries are used as a standpoint to compose an analogous query for the architectural discipline. The content of architecture, the agents that afford it, and the ways to assume it is the thread that is followed throughout Matter Matters.

Evolution is explored at the information end, hence, history and biology become important, in terms of theory, research, and applications. Knowledge, with its constructs and its components, is equally significant as it lies between information and the ultimate state of wisdom. Philosophy, theory, studies, and their comparison is the way to pursue a description of that instance. The present condition of libraries is studied through library science and the domains affiliated to it. In extent, a more personalised exploration is undertaken to attempt an approach toward the themes that are not included in the literature, and to contextualise the study. Current states of the urban and virtual idiomorphs of society are observed through contemporary literature, and the latest record of events that are related to them.

The main body of the study consists of reviews of texts that contribute to the understanding of the subject matter. Their positioning, agreement, and contradiction provide valuable elements for discussion. In looking at the nature of the new media of information, Castells, Dreyfus, McCullough and the sources that keep the account of its latest advances provide the nature of its existence. The history of information from the very beginning of it, until the current minute relies mainly on the writings of Wright. Kelly is a link between the evolution of species and the advances of digital technology. In assuming the anxiety angle of information abundance, the collection of sources and viewpoints that Wurman provides are of great value. Baudrillard, Illich, Benjamin, Burke, Ong, and Nietzsche lend their commentary to cast shadows on matters of theory, education, philosophy, history, and communication. The architectural implications of the theme, in the premises of critique, sensory, and material are represented with the critiques of Mitchell, Pallasmaa and Zumthor. The attempt to simultaneously combine objectivity and subjectivity in the premise of libraries could not be possible without the informative, as well as personal mediation of Manguel. Calvino extends the meanings of literature into social applications.

Borges appears more as a commentator in the dichotomy of knowledge and its institutional approaches. Specific sources were used to illustrate the happenings

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Introduction

that relate to the subject, like the Library Journal and digital technology reports.

Of important tactile experience are the visits to selected libraries in London. Each one has offered valuable contribution on the way such places are perceived. The particularities that derive from the areas they specialise have proven decisive parameters in the way they are used and their function toward the society.

A fictional story is used as a supporting devise to the study. Its protagonist, Valérie, is in the third decade of her life and is studying for a postgraduate qualification. She represents a group of people greatly affected by the subject of the study. Her origin is a reference to a culture deeply rooted in theoretical thought. Valérie is a contemporary flâneur, a character that the history has not officially witnessed for more than a century. The structure of her story keeps a close distance from the prose of the study. However, it is independent and its purpose is for exformation, rather than information. As the sequence of events in her life unfolds, some elements follow her to the next moment, whereas some others are subtracted. The latter do not disappear. On the contrary, they pass in the unconscious area of her mind, and occasionally appear on the surface. This is to illustrate that the remainder cannot be completely absent. In the course to reinvent herself, Valérie is not alone. Alexandre, Christian, and Diane are the people that share common place and time with her. Their initial is chosen to complete the indication of the four orientations of a plane, as they point on one side, and they are rooted to the other, just like V points downwards and is rooted at the opposite direction. The presence of the poetry of Cavafy is ubiquitous. It references the city of the grand ancient library, the implication to an urban reality not necessarily connected to its realm, but affected by it, and a dignity of self.

Poetry penetrates the prose of the study, as soon as the fictional prose approaches the end.

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2 Prologue

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Prologue

Driven by the first droplet that fell from the sky, ValĂŠrie walked into the covered market. Inside, elder couples having breakfast in the quaint little cafĂŠs, young mothers strolling side by side, pleasantly obstructing the passing of solitary visitors, students in the rush to their meeting taking a short-cut through, and merchants willingly exposing their commodities were the actors of the Saturday morning animation in the corridors. Although clearly in a place of discomfort, she kept a slow pace toward the central square, lazily observing the food and the artefacts on display. In her mid-twenties she had never really appreciated crafts, neither had she considered herself as a person that would do so in the future. The self-reassurance for that came a while after she had spent a couple of minutes staring at a low bedside table with a drawer.

It was seemingly well-crafted, fulfilled an obvious necessity given her recent moving into a college studio that contained a bed, closet, and desk along with an office chair. It came with a price she could afford.

Nevertheless, she walked away, since the object that had her attention for several moments was scrutinised with interest by a more possible buyer. She would not get between the furniture and the peculiar man; after all, there was no logic behind the specific choice.

As soon as she reached the market atrium, she took a right turn, leaving behind her the local florist, and then a left turn, to head to the cafĂŠ at the end of the far corridor. Flowers were not her predilection, but she could not help noticing the vivid yellow of the lilies that dominated the space with their simplistic aromatic palette. Whilst in the queue to get a cup of coffee she saluted a joyful triad of her peers at the School of Mathematics, pretended to check her mobile phone for new emails, and got off to the opposite direction in which they went. She had asked for a couple of ice cubes in

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Chapter 2

her boiling-hot coffee so that she could start drinking it right away. Sipping her chosen beverage greedily her path brought her, once again, in front of the bed-side table; the one with the drawer, which she was looking at moments ago. The adjacent litter bin facilitated the process as it enabled her to free her left hand from the paper cup. Valérie gave to the salesman the amount that the ticket read, and with her hands afresh occupied with the bed-side table, left the market – as she frequented – from the opening that she entered it.

It was not till very late at night, after she had unpacked her suitcase, and tidied her clothes in the order she preferred in the closet, that she noticed her new possession. Tired as she was, she pushed it gently next to her bed. Then, she aligned it with the wall and took the price tag off. Valérie turned off the light from the string hanging over her head, and while lying on the bed, set the alarm clock on her mobile phone, and placed it in the drawer.

The hollow sound of the alarm signified the wake-up time several hours later. Valérie opened the drawer with her left hand, took out the disturbing device and silenced it. As she sat on her bed to better look around for the bathroom – she always needed a couple of days to get used to a new studio – she noticed a neatly folded piece of paper inside the still-open drawer. With a half grace she took the piece of paper out and unfolded it. The printed letters read; ADDITION I do not question whether I am happy or unhappy.

Yet there is one thing that I keep gladly in mind – that in the great addition (their addition that I abhor) that has so many numbers, I am not one of the many units there. In the final sum

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Prologue

I have not been calculated. And this joy suffices me.

Constantine P. Cavafy, 1897 A note in the margin stated, Uncalculated exist so many other ‘’units’’ and it might just need their sum – that you so much abhor – to turn your momentary joy into happiness. This margin is too narrow for me to explain – Che fece... il grand rifiuto.

The sheet carried a page number in the middle of the bottom of the page on each side and had the marks of the book binding on one edge. It had a yellowish hue and although the linear marks from the folding had the minimum of consequences on its quality, it was evident that the specific page was turned back and forward several times. Although the note was written in pencil, there were traces of ink on the edge of the page opposite the binding side, possibly from a stamp. Valérie was astonished by every possible bit of information that the sheet carried. She carefully folded it back to the way she had found it, and while getting dressed consciously repeated the words of the prose, and the words of the comment; the first because they described in detail her current feelings, and the latter because they provided a presumable altera pars, of which she could not think. There was another reason related to the repetitive mumbling of the commentary. The statement that was used by the commentator to excuse his or her inadequacy for explanation was used some centuries ago by her beloved mathematician Pierre de Fermat. She was exploring his number theory for her doctorate diploma.

The marks, the hue, the page numbers, the Latin phrase – or maybe signature – she would eagerly devote her spare time to explore.

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3 Matter of Fact

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Matter of Fact

Her favourite pair of jeans laid half on the bed and half on the side of it. Resting on the carefully straightened quilt, neatly arrayed were her underwear and tights. On top of the trousers, the freshly ironed off-white shirt concluded her outfit choice for the day.

Right where the jeans ended, a pair of beige bow trimmed ballet flats were neatly waiting for Valérie to finish the Sunday morning shower. Although nothing odd took place during her morning routine, she noticed a faint smile in the mirror while observing herself. The surprise was not the good mood; after all the free day could easily explain that. It was not the smile, either; often enough she caught herself doing that very expression. But looking at herself in the mirror was definitely something that was not happening frequently.

During the walk toward the café, where she enjoyed having breakfast, a sudden thought made her force her pace slightly into the University bookshop she used to buy mathematics books at when she was studying for the bachelor degree. A few words and a visit to the till later, she became the owner of the first poetry collection she had ever bought: The Selected Poems of Cavafy. The edition was less worn, and definitely newer to the one of which she possessed just one poem. Its reading took her through morning to lunchtime, and to the evening, leaving the café table occupied for several hours and Valérie enchanted throughout the pages. The sense of dignity and the forbidden joys in the prose, the casual irony and self-critique of the poet, and the ghost of the chance to track down the mysterious commentator with whom she already felt that she shared a lot activated the mechanisms of her brain with unprecedented exuberance.

As a mathematics researcher she felt perfectly capable of constructing a method leading to the solution. The

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Chapter 3

notions she dealt with on an everyday basis were much more vague. A memory of her childhood kept appearing in her mind. Her father used to say that no matter how small the possibility might seem, there is always a way toward it, on the presumption that the will and the reason behind the chase both exist. The smell of the house in which she grew up returned to her. She always used to make that same connection between her childhood memories and the smells that were around back then.

It filled her with confidence. The will to analyse the facts, come up with an approach, source the additional information that she would need and combine everything into the appropriate result to finally get what she wanted was strong. The reason was much simpler. It was intrigue. * The sense of the unknown, the alluring co-existence of imagination and reality, the faith that somewhere, somehow, there is a place that can fulfil specific, or unspecific needs, contribute to the motive power of quest, and exploration.

However, the reason behind it might take a more primitive form than that of intrigue, i.e. survival. Simple creatures have the capability to source data, process them, identify causalities and consequences and present the findings amongst peers. In the society of a bee hive, the sequence of finding and harvesting food takes a whole network of loyal participants to happen. When the swarm decides to move to the front slot of the bee hive, the queen follows the rest. The daughters of the queen signify the area of the slot that the core population of the bees will wait. A few randomly selected anonymous scout workers fly out and check the vicinity for potential food sources. Upon their return, a choreographic representation of the richness of the source they found takes place. The more intense the choreography appears, the more abundant the source seems to the rest of the bees. Each of the scout workers performs its own choreography and deputy bees follow the most theatrical scout to the possible source. In the case the source is indeed as promised, they return joining the swirling of the scout. That induces more workers to follow, and then more, until the whole of them exhaust the source (Kelly, 1995). The willingness to work collaboratively is what allows a

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Matter of Fact

society of animals to conceptualise its world as an inventory of mimetic responses (Wright, 2007). Culture and the evolution of species follow after that. According to the biologist, Edward O. Wilson (2000, 138), “Culture is created by the human mind, and each mind in turn is the product of the genetically structured human brain.” This means that in the case of the human species, there is the advantage of relatively more complex genetic material.

Stone Age Tribes Disregarding temporarily evolutionary biology and focusing on the mere historic evidence of the human species trajectory through time, the beginning could be considered around one hundred thousand years ago. Homo Sapiens had already reached anatomic modernity and it took some sixty thousand years for them to begin producing symbols or similar manifestations of human culture (Wright, 2007). The beginning of symbolic expression coincides chronologically with the last ice age that this planet has experienced. As temperatures kept falling and resources became scarce, Homo Sapiens started competing over food supplies. Tribes began to form where food abundance existed and geographic proximity among humans triggered symbolic expression (Wright, 2007). Perhaps choreographic expressions like the ones of the scout worker bees were not the frequency between humans, and most probably the gestures, and sounds, did not include twirling, or buzzing at the entrance of a cave. There is no apparent way to monitor the everyday routine of ancestors that do not exist, yet there is evidence that in less than forty thousand years after communication was initiated, the first cities started to thrive in the ancient kingdom of Sumeria. Within what is described as “a mind-defeating jumble of temples, dwellings, storerooms, and alleyways” (Cahill, 1998, 11), merchants endeavoured to devise better ways to keep track of their accounts. Writing emerged as the means toward practicality, by taking advantage of the techniques of counting and drawing that had emerged right after the first tribes were formed (Wright, 2007). Local scripts, like contracts, laws, and religious words began to formulate and new, more abstract social networks emerged (Wright, 2007). The foundation for new hierarchies had been established on the basis of the written document. This was not something that happened only in Sumeria.

Hellenistic and Roman Years The colonisation of the Greek peninsula by troops from the Caucasian Mountains during the second century B.C., and the establishment of kingdoms throughout

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Chapter 3

the region marked the beginning of the Mycenaean Age. The established caste system was based, akin to the kingdoms in Mesopotamia, on the power of the written word (Wright, 2007). The resemblance of Mycenaeans and Minoans with the Sumerians was in the same social networks, following similar scripts. As an indirect consequence of the Trojan war, by the time the first period of the Greek civilisation ended,, a well-established culture of laws and religion had been founded. The re-emergence of the Greek civilisation around 900 B.C. coincides with the adoption of a Phoenician script. Based on sounds, rather than on the ideas expressed (Wright, 2007), the new script gave birth to the first alphabet. The period that followed was marked by a negotiation between the traditional oral stories and the written ones. Three hundred years after the alphabet, i.e. the time of the civic festivals (Wright, 2007), there existed no standardised version of the same myth. A major confusion issue for some, the beginning of theoretical thought for others (Wright, 2007), the massive amount of written documents that were hatched presented the opportunity for collection and study.

The Egyptian tradition, specifically the Egyptian god-king Thamus, might have considered writing as “an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence” (Plato, n.a./2008, n.p.) and thus, no real contribution toward learning, but it was the personal collection of Aristotle that enabled and inspired the Great Library at Alexandria at around 300 B.C. (Wright, 2007). Open to the public, or at least the people Ptolemy considered “public”, it was an attraction for the scholars of the Hellenistic era. This derived from the vast amount of items that the institution hosted, and the generous tax-free salary that the king offered. The library grew to house hundreds of thousands of volumes. When Julius Caesar arrived to the city at 47 B.C., he witnessed a collection of 700,000 strolls (Wright, 2007). After invading the city, and shortly before his death, he ordered the building of libraries throughout the Roman Empire (Wright, 2007). No fewer than twenty-eight public libraries existed in Rome, and many more in the Roman empire, by the 400 A.D. (Wright, 2007). The codex, a new form of document based on wood, was the new material that emerged during the prosperous times of Rome, providing the technology for the bound book (Wright, 2007), and promising the continuation of the evolution of written word. The fall of the empire followed some decades later.

In the hand of the Vandals who invaded the city went Pax Romana, the libraries, and the social network that was based on those.

In his book, Glut: Mastering Information Through Ages, Alex Wright (2007, 57) argues

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Matter of Fact

that a repetitive pattern occurs whenever the subject matter is history; “[F]irst came literacy, then the nation-state, the empire, and ultimately the intellectual apotheosis of the empire, the library. When empires fall, they usually take their libraries with them.” The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1873/1997, n.p.), in his nominal On the Use and Abuse of History for Life argues that “so far as there are laws in history, they are worth nothing, and history is worth nothing.”

The answer for the proposed contradictory hypotheses is to be given by the history itself; information production and manipulation did not cease after the fall of the Roman empire.

Innovation, Order and Practicality During the Dark Ages that followed, the empire was divided into smaller societies, not particularly different to the tribal societies of the early Homo Sapiens era (Wright, 2007). The emergence of the bound book introduced the medium to non-literate people in the form of the medieval manuscript. The monks who were reproducing the manuscripts often enough added their own comments or topics to their writing routine (Wright, 2007). This practice allowed multiple discourses within the writings and enabled not only the use of decorated margins, illustrations and new layer types but also other non-referential characteristics like critiques, or topics of the personal interest of the monks (Wright, 2007).

The function of writing was about to change once again. By the twelfth century A.D. documents were not considered as the carriers of information. Text moved closer to the fact that it described and became the fact in itself (Stock, 1987). The implication of the existence of a “social fact” affected the way people thought of their relationship with other individuals and this fed “back into the network of real interdependencies” (Stock, 1987, 83).

The new technology of paper, the arrival of the printing press – a creation of Gutenberg – and its propagation throughout Europe (Febvre & Martin, 1990) had enhanced – perhaps in an unforeseen way – the production process of books. The mass-production of books caused the division of their trade into “canonical” and popular knowledge (Wright, 2007). Readers and non-readers bustled toward the popular books, in which word and image shared jointly the printed space (Wright, 2007). In a brief interval of time, text became the embodiment rather than the vessel of information. Books went from scarcity to abundance and oral culture started sharing mutual space with written word. According to Wright (2007), there have been three periods of information technology by the sixteenth century.

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Chapter 3

During the first, tribal societies had been bound together with participatory unitary knowledge systems. The second period was marked by the emergence of literate classes which ruled the masses that relied in oral traditions in the name of the written word. The third period was characterised by the bringing of the two orbits closer together.

Whether the history of information is linear, repetitive or of another more complex shape, is part of a question that had started being analysed after the sixteenth century A.D. In fact, the scholars of the time approached the issue from its foundation. Instead of direct elaboration with its history per se, they questioned the nature of it and they started from the attribute of memory.

Subverting the foundations that had been laid in Ancient Greece, Rome and monastic cultures of the thirteenth century B.C. (Wright, 2007) on the nature and techniques of memory, Francis Bacon proposed the implementation of mentally organised artificial places – literal, imaginary or other - in memory (Eisenstein, 1980). Another concept of organising information was proposed by the bishop Dr. John Wilkins, who suggested the dividing of the physical world in forty categories, themselves divided into forty categories again. The whole system generated four-letter names for each of the entries, based on their position amongst the categories (Wright, 2007). It was such a misleading and complicated system, that Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer had added his own suggestions in a satyric tone, in his “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” In his own words (Borges, 1942/1999, n.p.), “The word salmon does not tell us anything; zana, the corresponding word, defines (for the man knowing the forty categories and the species of these categories) a scaled river fish, with ruddy meat”. It was clear that taxonomy was going to be the issue of the nineteenth century.

The era of the industrial revolution brought, along with factories, mills and ideologies, a transformation of the economy of the written word (Wright, 2007).

Books became commodities, and with public education as the decisive innovation, a growing market of newly literate readers was created. Along came the revival of the institution of the library, which enhanced the taxonomy and classification matters of information. Among the suggested systems, there was one that caught the attention of the parts involved. It was the Decimal System of Melville Dewey.

The system incorporated nine divisions in hundreds (100-900), nine more in tens (10-90), and yet nine more in units (1-9). The top-down deterministic system was criticised by its contemporaries (Wright, 2007). However, it has survived over the

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Matter of Fact

years till the present day. The hint of Dewey (1876, 3) himself concludes the very nature of the system, “Theoretically, the division of every subject into just nine heads is absurd. Practically, it is desirable.”

Visions Together with imaginative speculation, practicality was the key. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Paul Otlet conceived a system which presented an unprecedented possibility, that is “marrying the determinism of a top-down classification system with the bottom-up relativism of emergent social networks” (Wright, 2007, 192). The vision was for a workstation for scholars dubbed Mundaneum (Levy, 2002, cited in Wright, 2007, 185): Here, the workspace is no longer cluttered with any books. In their place, a screen and a telephone within reach. Over there, in an immense edifice, are all the books and information. From there, the page to be read... is made to appear on the screen. The screen could be divided in half, by four, or even by ten, if multiple texts and documents had to be consulted simultaneously... Cinema, phonographs, radio, television: three instruments, taken as substitutes for the book, will in fact become the new book, the most powerful works for the diffusion of human thought. This will be the radiated library, and the televised book.

The shivers of an individual who lives in the twenty-first century listening those words in the documentary film The Man Who Wanted To Classify The World (Levy, 2002) can be imagined relatively easily. The project that Otlet had conceived and conceptualised never reached the eyes or the ears of those who would make history out of it. He died in his flat in Brussels during WWII, not a period that speculations of that kind flourished. He was not found until 1968 (Wright, 2007).

In the meantime, and while Mundaneum never made it to reveal itself to the world in time, Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think” in the Atlantic Monthly. In that essay (Bush, 1945, n.p.) he envisioned Memex, a scholar environment which would consist of five parts: a document database in micro-film, a screen, the means to contribute information on the micro-film, a processor for the ability to search the database and “associative trails”. It might be that Otlet had coined the term “link” well before Bush, and that it was a far better word to describe what it was, but Bush came first into actually reporting it as “allowing the authors (and readers) to insert explicit linkages between documents in a collection” (Wright, 2007, 199). Thus, the Memex did not penetrate the document per se, whereas the Mundaneum did. Both systems though, allowed contribution of information,

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Chapter 3

a characteristic that in a counter-factual approach, would cause revolutionary changes into the contemporary form of the Internet, even if the latter was decades away.

The idea of the “associative trails� inspired a library science student named Eugene Garfield to create the Science Citation Index, a system that would prioritise search results according to their influence and popularity. Sergey Brin and Larry Page based an algorithm named PageRank on the ideas that derived from that system. It was an algorithm that would prove crucial for the twenty-first century because it is the code behind their search engine: Google (Brin & Page, 1998).

Based on the theory that human mind needs small, organised, structured, interrelated steps in order to reach into cognition Engelbart (1962) proposed a conceptual framework, which in turn gave birth to a working prototype dubbed NLS (oN-Line System), which included a word-processing system, messaging facility and links. PARC (Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre) took the lead and during the 1970’s invented the foundations of the modern computer, a graphical user interface in windows, bit-map displays and Ethernet (Wright, 2007). The direct inspiration for the World Wide Web (W.W.W.) came from a series of books by Ted Nelson. Computer Lib/ Dream Machines (1974), and Literary Machines (1980) gave birth to the Xanadu programme (Castells, 2003), which carried an intention that can be described as a browser. Nelson depicted humanistic virtues in the Xanadu, notably hyper-links that could share visceral and sensory experiences while supporting document processing, file management, email and list creation (Wright, 2007).

The contemporary manifestation of the W.W.W. does not necessarily include the hopes of that inspirational figure, as its humanistic virtue is ambiguous. According to Wright (2007, 215), Writing emerged at the hands of the merchants; the printing press spread not because of the Gutenberg Bible but on the strength of a booming business in religious indulgences and contracts; so it should perhaps come as no surprise that adoption of the Web has been fuelled largely by commercial interests.

Reality The conceptual framework of the Internet might have been negotiated independently by various agents who were individuals or groups, but it took the funding from the United States Department of Defence to develop it to the form it

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appears today. Starting in the 1960’s, ARPANET project engineers were working on the backbone of the modern Web (Castells, 2003). It was through that programme that the Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) was created. National Science Foundation for the Net (NSFNet) was a direct output of the project, and was designed to support institutions of higher education (Wright, 2007). Before the NSFNet opened the Internet to the public, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland had developed and launched a “hypertext retrieval tool” (Castells, 2003). Its name was WorldWideWeb. The rest is not history, or at least, not yet. The history of W.W.W. is still being written. Perhaps this is the difference between the model adopted by Wright (2007) – tribe, literacy, state, empire, intellectual apotheosis, fall – and the (absence of the) one that is suggested

by Nietzsche (1873/1999). At the moment when history is made, there is no obvious shape to it. A series of facts swirl around its trajectory, just like the scout workers in the hive do and it is a matter of the apiece circumstances which of them will contribute to its direction. At the moment when history is written, the shape of it is clearer – although, rarely crystal clear – and thus, the identification of its shape is facilitated. Even then, there is no evidence that the shape will remain untouched. It is in the readiness of the species involved to evaluate it, reshape it and assign new meaning to it. Fixity and fluidity are in constant rotation.

Bi-polar binaries In nearly one hundred thousand years of history, the manifestations of information have succeeded to oscillate between idiomorphs. Idiomorphs which had one common characteristic, i.e. instability. Thought is considered to have changed from mythic to rhetoric, yet there are clearly areas of exploration which still appear as mythic to the human species. Documents became self-referential entities, rather than vessels of information, yet there are vessels which remain untouched and will continue to feed fears, dreams and hopes. Linearity and nonlinearity appear to be complementary notions, rather than contradictory ones.

In the beginning was the word, or is it that the word presumes knowledge? Oral and literate cultures are so closely interwoven that one is almost the mediation of the other. Just like the prehistoric tribes mingled to formulate greater entities, contemporary tribes seek for similar groups in physical, or virtual space. And if information has undergone a course from scarcity to super-abundance, why does it get harder and harder to actually find the part of it that is of greatest interest? *

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Some hundreds of thousands of search results appeared on the laptop computer screen. ValĂŠrie scrolled through the numerous web pages with astonishment. The poetry of Cavafy held a high position in the preferences of the public. Given his origin, the language in that he wrote the poems, the sexual background, and the fact that he died some seventy-five years ago, his reputation was high; perhaps a lot higher than she could foresee.

Patiently, she kept organised notes on what she read and kept on her computer hard disk anything that could prove useful.

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4 What’s the Matter?

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She could nearly read the series of letters on her face, accurately described by the little squares of the keyboard; a little bit of Q on the side of her nose, then R-T-Y on her right cheekbone, S and F loosely on her cheek, and the upper left angle of the space bar next to her lips. Her laptop keyboard deliberately carried the relief of each letter, to facilitate her working late at night, sometimes with really minimal lighting, and sometimes solely with the light of the screen, but she had never had the imprints of those relieves on her face before. She had usually resisted her exhaustion to fight off sleep at when she was working on her graph modelling, so her sleeping on the keyboard was another thing that was happening for the first time, one of the many she had experienced during that weekend.

The good thing was that all the bits of information that she had retrieved previously that morning were there intact: analyses over analyses of the work of Cavafy, dozens of biographic references, notes of the prevailing themes in the poems, images of him, and Alexandria, even a series of paintings on his poems by a renowned English artist. The bad thing was that she had to run to get to the office on time. She closed the laptop screen, quickly collected her hand-written notes, put everything in her bag and headed to the door. In a moment of hesitation, ValĂŠrie remembered the piece of paper she kept all the user-names and passwords she had been using to enter several poetry fora the previous night, picked it up from the desk and ran to her office. She was late. + The very nature of the medium, the Internet and its self-evolving development (Castells, 2003), invites the users to elaborate their own personal authorship (McCullough, 2008) and become producers of content, shapers of the network rather than mere consumers of information. The culture of users that had initially become involved with the Internet at its early days, gradually started to co-exist with frequent users that were members of a public interested in the new source

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of information. The technology-elites and the hackers who were rooted in academia and science, along with the pioneering virtual communitarians and entrepreneurs of political and commercial backgrounds, are nowadays sharing the virtual space with random and anonymous web-surfers (Castells, 2003). According to Richard Saul Wurman (2000, 2), who was previously an architect and since the 1970s, an information architect, “cross-pollination is the norm”. Ivan Illich (1973), clearly affected by the decade he writes, illustrates ideas about people “deliberately choosing a life of action, over a life of consumption”. Nearly forty years later, consumption and production are cross-connected on the Internet in a balance that is leaning towards the first rather than the latter.

Hyper-links and Search Engines “Connectivity [has] become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first century urban condition” (Mitchell, 2003, 11). This is illustrated by William Mitchell (2003, 62) through a short, yet colourful phrase: “I link, therefore I am.” The existential capacity of hyper-links is doubted by Hubert Dreyfus (2001), due to the lack of an imposed authoritarian structure on them. In his book On the Internet, Dreyfus (2001) objects to their usefulness, denominating all of them as alike and blames link popularity and link annotation for the eclipse of relevancy between the need of the user and the suggested options (Dreyfus, 2001). Indeed, the “form follows feedback” doctrine of natural contexts does not find a continuum in hyper-links, mainly because it strains its effectiveness primarily in measuring the popularity of the target rather than its relevance. The opportunity that rises because of the amount of the available information dooms itself because a crushing percentage is neither meaningful, nor understandable (Wurman, 2000). In the case that the popular result matches the relevant result, the non-organic structure of information does not reveal itself. In the opposite event, ephemeral unedited information takes the form of “ambient pollution” (McCullough, 2008, pp.69-70), and demands reconsideration. Information is more, but not better (Mitchell, 2003), and the hardest part about searching for it is that “you [have] to think like a search engine” (Wurman, 2000, 171). Perhaps the latest advances of search and news-feed websites, such as Google or Bing, is that they “learn” how to personalise results according to the preferences and the long-demonstrated behaviour of the user. Still, this is hardly the next step of the search engines, primarily because this characteristic is not interactive. The user does not know what is filtered or how (Ostrow, 2011). Preferences aside, there are still a lot on which search engines rely their expedience. An invited project by the artist Stephanie Davidson (2011)

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aggregates the lot in a biblical manner: THE GOOGLE COMMANDMENTS 1. Thou shall create rich relevant content 2. Thou shall link to relevant websites 3. Thou shall not redirect traffic 4. Thou shall not create doorway pages 5. Thou shall not create multiple domains 6. Thou shall not create duplicate content 7. Thou shall not create hidden links 8. Thou shall not create mirror sites 9. Thou shall not create misleading domains 10. Thou shall not use irrelevant keywords

The critical pen of Baudrillard (1995, 29) circumscribes the matter under the rules of its own bottom-up nature, “You are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word […] No more subject, no more focal point, no more centre, or periphery: pure flexion, or circular inflexion”.

The intangibility, diffusion, and diffraction of the medium (Baudrillard, 1995) are proven to be major characteristics of it. Nevertheless, they are hardly unprecedented as attributes.

Brain Malnutrition, Context, and Time When it comes to on-the-spot information, a glimpse at instructions that consumer products of the current time carry reveals both a gap of communication between parts and a lack of critical analysis. The inscription “Contains nuts” on bags of peanuts, or the warning “Defrost” on a frozen dinner constitute a clear hint about the quality of information that is sent, and the treasure hunt approach that is needed by the receiver to adapt to (Wurman, 2000). Reassurance for even the profound, and encouragement on the quest for it, is deeply rooted in the contemporary educational system, at least of the western civilisation.

The “age-specific, teacher-related process requiring full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum” (Illich, 1995, 25-26) is founded on “truths” which provide that “The one who always has the right answer wins” or that “Students should be stuffed with facts like sausages” (Wurman, 2000, 238-240). Adding to this the incompetence of providing the tools for creative or exploratory skill, the outcome

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is a type of imagination formed by curricular instructions, which degenerates learning into data retrieval, thus neglecting unmeasured experience (Illich, 1995).

Norretranders maintains that (1999, 31), “Calculation is the method of getting rid of information in which you are not interested. You throw away what is not relevant”. The whole of the body of information, characterised by ignorance and disorder is shaped by both useful and non-useful bits (Norretranders, 1999, 42): Entropy is a measure of an amount of information we have no interest in knowing. Information is something to be found in bulk in a state where entropy is great. That does not mean we possess this information; it means only that it is there, that we can obtain it if we could be bothered.

One cannot define entropy and information, unless the context is known.

Messages of any kind serve their purposes when particular and specific. Context matters, hence, there is no possible way to safely discard information about something which is viewed from outside. Experience matters. In the absence of context, every possible problem is downgraded into a routine of the Alan Turing Machine (Figure 4i), an infinite ribbon connected to a type-writer that could write, read, correct and keep everything in its memory. The proposed statement is that “you can compute anything that has already been computed” (Norretranders, 1999, 57) given that there is the availability of time. Infinite capacity combined with infinite time are attributes that rarely, if ever, can be found.

“What we perceive at any moment […] is limited to an extremely small compartment in the stream of information about our surroundings flowing in from the sense organs” (Zimmerman, 1989, cited in Norretranders, 1999, 124).

Every single word out of the statement of Professor Zimmerman is crucial but “moment” captures the most interest. Time is the defining parameter, when it comes to the conscious perception of information. The human sensory system is structured according to the bits per second that are sent and received. The quantity of information that flows through the organs is massive. The eyes send ten million bits of information per second to the brain. Another million is sent by the skin, one hundred thousand by the ear, one hundred thousand by the nose, and a thousand through the taste sensors (Norretranders, 1999). The account of subliminal perception i.e. the perception that occurs without conscious awareness proves that the mind and body are one intelligence (Thackara, 2005). Of all the

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Figure 4i - Diagram of the Turing machine (University of Arkansas, 2009)

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information that arrives into the brain, only a fraction of forty to fifty bits per second is conscious (Norretranders, 1999). The issue then is to be able to discard large amounts of irrelevant material and accept the bits of information that are mostly relevant (Norretranders, 1999). According to Norretranders (1999, 138), the human bandwidth of consciousness in processing information according to what each activity demands is, Silent reading Reading aloud Proofreading Typewriting Piano playing Multiplying and adding two numbers Counting objects

45 bits/ second 30 bits/ second 18 bits/ second 16 bits/ second 23 bits/ second 12 bits/ second 3 bits/ second

On the other hand, the information flow in sensory systems and conscious perception is according to Norretranders (1999, 143), Sensory System Eyes Skin Ears Smell Taste

Total Bandwidth (bits/ sec) 10 000 000 1 000 000 100 000 100 000 1 000

Conscious Bandwidth (bits/ sec) 40 5 30 1 1

When it comes to better understanding, exformation is thus more important than information (Norretranders, 1999). Regardless of the amount of information that is broadcast, the ability to distinguish what makes sense from what does not make sense is crucial.

Information Flood In the scale of the global network, where faster and more, and more voluminous streams of information are delivered (Mitchell, 2003), attention becomes a scarce resource. Akin to the shocking experience of the fl창neur, the stroller of the narrow streets of Paris, the contemporary individual is no different to the one that Baudelaire (1857/2008) describes in his poems. Walter Benjamin (1968, 175) illustrates the situation as a reservoir of electric energy, and describes the

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attender as “a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness”. Open to diversion and affected by the surrounding flux, the contemporary flâneur doubled the confusion by having to deal with both the physical and the virtual surroundings. The two worlds are neither homogeneous nor a continuum of one another (Mitchell, 2003).

“The result is to reinforce what philosophers call our ontological alienation, a sense of rootlessness and anxiety, of not quite being real, of being lost in space”, according to John Thackara (2005, 100-101). The semiology of Baudrillard underscores the anxiety (1995, 106); “[W]e are already virtually in another universe: which is nothing but the mirrored equivalent of this one. But which universe is this one?” In addition, what are the objects depicted in either of them?

Content as the Remainder The most well-established medium of information and the one with the highest impact factor is the one of writing. Among all forms of text, “the one that has held sway longest and most authoritatively, at least in the modern west, is bibliographic” (McCullough, 2008, 66). Therefore, the notice that Google had made available to download over three million books (Hannaford, 2010) was no surprise for the global public. One can now access and retrieve book titles spanning all disciplines through their electronic devices, stationery or portable.

Other companies had proceeded to related actions before Google too. From its vast collection, Amazon sells electronic books that can be read on its own device, the Kindle, or on digital applications on the devices of other manufacturers. Apple had previously launched the iBooks application to facilitate the purchase and reading of numerous titles on its iPhone and iPad (Figure 4ii). The latter devices can take on board a number of electronic applications that have the same function. The list of devices with the potential to display text that one can read comfortably for their own interest is long, and it will become longer as the demand for this kind of facility rises. According to Time Magazine, the iPad ranks first among the inventions of 2010 (McCracken, 2011). More than 400 millions users are predicted for the tablet market in the following five years (Frommer, 2011). To some critics, the age of Google dooms libraries to immediate obsolescence. As McCullough states (2008, 66); When all work has been scanned, when enough new information is produced annually to surpass the volume of the largest library by at least a factor thirty, and the best information architecture is available from the contexts of the office, or the comforts of home, when search engines crawl all libraries’ and indeed all servers’ holdings as one; is there a there, there, at the public library anymore?

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Figure 4ii - Apple iPad and the iBooks application (Zath, 2010)

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Unavoidably, the words by Baudrillard (1995, 144) on the residual appear as relevant; “When a system has absorbed everything, when one has added everything up, when nothing remains, the entire sum turns to the remainder and becomes the remainder.” The predictions on the obsolescence of materials like paper and media such as film, due to the coming of computer and television respectively have not matched the contemporary reality (Wurman, 2000). There is no clear indication about the obsolescence of books either. Printing is still something that will continue to manifest, if with a slight procedural change.

Mitchell states (2000, 103): “Once, it made sense to print, then distribute; now it may be better to distribute, then print.” The pricing probes for e-books (Evans, 2011), driven by the paper-books industry illustrate the concern on the future of the traditional book. In addition, the protocol for the electronic book lending method that libraries in the United States of America have signed (Rossi, 2011) proves that there is a rising interest on the future of the physical library. Campus library as a study place loses ground in the preferences of students; a laptopfriendly café, an idyllic spot in the park, or a train seat provide convenient places to brainstorm, concentrate and read (Mitchell, 2005, 102). Whether the state of mobility and remote acquiring of information dooms libraries to a closure is to be seen, but uncertainty remains. What will the consequences be if the prediction comes true? How will the acquiring of knowledge change?

From Data to Wisdom Mitchell (2000, 17) argues; “The more bits per second [you push] through a communications channel, the more complex and sophisticated the interchanges and transactions that can take place over it.” Information retrieval carries interchanges and transactions but is not comprised solely by those. Peripheral information that is the information that the context contains “plays a crucial role in establishing the character of a place, and sustaining your relationship to it” (Mitchell, 2000, 37), let alone the nature of information that is at stake.

Otherwise, in the state where information is excluded from its context, it becomes a mere interaction with the container, be it the computer, the tablet or other.

The situation becomes the realisation of the Turing machine. But what will be the cost on the knowledge in the circumstance that internal cognitive processes and external computational processes become all part of an interaction with the glass mediator?

If information anxiety is what lies between data and knowledge (Wurman, 2000),

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Figure 4iii - Diagram: Data to Wisdom

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what is between data and wisdom and how is that affected? The following model is the dichotomy of the proposals of Hubert Dreyfus (2001), and Nathan Shedroff (in Wurman, 2000) on the path of understanding, i.e. the path from data to wisdom.

Information is the aggregate of facts, data and context. Along with tacit knowledge – practising something, therefore knowing about it –, and explicit knowledge – possess the knowledge of the theory of something –, information contributes to knowledge.

The latter united with internalisation, externalisation, socialisation, and the ability to combine these together, given that the mental mechanism is available, leads to wisdom (Figure 4iii).

In the case that it is accessed via digital devices, enabled by hyper-links and located by the use of electronic search engines, information is retrieved in its purest form. Exempted from its context, disassociated with the facts and data that constitute it, it is likely not to fulfil its part in the trajectory illustrated by theory and compressed into the diagram “Information to Wisdom” (figure 4.x).

Norretranders (1999) agrees that the measuring and obtaining of information is not what costs; wisdom is what costs. Biologist, Bernd-Olaf Kuppers maintains (1990) that a theory that relies solely on data can never be assumed as complete.

David Hilbert, the mathematician who championed the scientific proof for the completeness and purity of knowledge with the words “We must know. We shall know”, died saying those exact words. Only, a brief, self-sarcastic laughter followed them, and then he passed away (Norretranders, 1999). The speculations of the present day for the future are more precise in terms of capacity, as it appears.

Contemporary Context Gordon Bell (1997, 31) researcher in Microsoft and father of the “mini-computer” predicts that; By 2047, one can imagine a body-networked, on-board assistant – a guardian angel that can capture and retrieve everything we here, read, and see. It could have as much processing power as its master, that is 1,000 million-million operations per second (one petaops), and a memory of 10 terabytes.

Looking at both digital and analogue information storing devices, researchers reveal that humankind can store nearly 300 exabytes of information, i.e. the number three-hundred followed by twenty zeros (University of South Carolina, 2011). This means that if each grain of sand on Earth is matched with 315 bits of

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information, there would be enough of the latter to cover the number needed.

On the other hand, the amount does not surpass the amount of information that is contained in the DNA of a single human being. In fact, it is less than one per cent. The aspirations of technology-priests for the future of human species and the output of current researches for the present of information conclude that the digital era has merely started and the humankind should prepare for more. Digital networks have penetrated most aspects of living and are currently challenging long-established distinctions between digital and analogue domains. The phrase “I am cyborg” by Mitchell (2003, 39) in his book Me++ illustrates vividly the current situation of the species.

Within the cross-connected networks and digitally distributed information some genre boundaries seem to descend into limbo. The continuous injection of new information into contexts where it was scarce adds layers of understanding and misunderstanding. The expanded sense of community that has been created pushes people with like interests to get together and discuss similar situations, be them medical, political, scientific, or the product of religion and mysticism (Wurman, 2000). As some boundaries of communication are falling, other less visible ones are rising. The socio-cultural boundaries and categorical identities that emerge span “specialists in professional scholarly areas, members of religious sects, sharers of sexual identities, promoters of political causes, sufferers of specific diseases, cocker spaniel owners, Linux hackers, frequent flyers, Buick dealers, cigar smokers, Trekkies, Barbie doll collectors, or whatever” (Mitchell, 2000, 89). Because most of the interaction happens on-line, these members of society are rendered invisible to others. The vision for a worldwide electronic agora is therefore compromised, precisely due to the fact that the members of the Athenian agora were “directly affected by the issues they were discussing, and, most importantly, the point of the discussion was for them to take the responsibility and risk of voting publicly on the questions they were debating” (Dreyfus, 2001, 104). In other words, the Greek agora was not simply a gathering for the discussion of common goals. On top of that, it was an aggregation of people who were acquainted with each other. Knowing each other user of the Internet might be impossible. Nonetheless, the density and population of the medium provides a critical mass for the support of social services. The ability for local inscription i.e. virtual areas characterised by geographic locality, or even, community has created thousands of active participants. The development of urban mark-up in virtual space is also enabled (McCullough, 2008). In a way, the

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evolution of society through the Internet is still in an incipient stage.

The legacy of the digital revolution is the ability for connection between every inhabited place on the face of the planet. The functions of the boxes – laptops, smart-phones, tablets – that it provided and the “wholesale transfer of functionality and attention to screen space, where the distant and the past are continuously available” (Mitchell, 2005, 185) are the consequences of that legacy.

Foundational, and even primal conditions have been altered and the demand for software, instead of hardware has been championed (Bratton, 2009). The electronically embedded and enabled relationships are proliferating in most aspects of living, while face-to-face transactions are gradually being reduced (Mitchell, 2000). The result of the “friction-free capitalism” suggested by Bill Gates (1995, 157-183) is not the information society that was aspired; rather it is an information market, where downsizing, globalisation and acceleration are fragmenting the social fabric (Thackara, 2005). Even though Baudrillard (1995, 76) argues that the hypermarket is the “retranscription of the contradictory fluxes in terms of integrated circuits, [and the] space-time of a whole operational simulation of social life”, he notes that the production of a new violence to bring it down is impossible, due to the loss of the referential of knowledge, the cultural model that the original violence of 1968 was founded upon. The trajectory of events since 1968 might have brought a political system that could be considered to have analogies to the one that the specific violence attempted to seize. In spite of this, the events of Paris and the relevant events across Europe succeeded into raising consciousness and fostering a spirit of resistance (Leach, 1999). It was within that spirit that new ideas started to flourish in many domains including architecture.

The Role of Architecture The aftermath of the era that is referenced by Jean Baudrillard coincides with the time that Mike Barnard and David Greene of Archigram foresaw the trajectory of miniaturisation by imagining the “electric aborigine” (Figure 4iv) and maintaining that “people are walking architecture” (Cook, 1999, 119). The Vitruvian Man of architecture started to be inscribed into radiating electro-magnetic waves since the 1970s and has not stopped reinventing himself until now. But the urban context is also labelled with associative information, both visible and invisible: from the signs in the street and on the buildings to the labels on consumers products. From the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags of the architectural

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Figure 4iv - Material from Bac-Pac Man by Greene and Barnard (Archigram, 2010/ 1969)

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features to those of the consumers products, objects, regardless of scale, are inscribed. Transaction records are informed by the RFID tags of wine bottles and the like. In this way, retailers and manufacturers obtain market information.

In a similar way, architectural features are enabled. Physical objects also carry associations. Spaces carry even more. The point is not to flood the context with virtual associations, over existing; neither it is to abolish long-established human relationships, and invent new, electronic ones. Since humanity has started living closely to, or even inside (Pawley, 1998), terminals of information, the issue for architecture is not to exhaust the opportunities that arise from architectural features on equipment for façades, i.e. sensors and the like. It is not an issue of sizing the agora either. As Mitchell (2005, 19) stresses; “Architecture no longer can (if it ever could) be understood as an autonomous medium of mass, space, and light, but now serves as the constructed ground for encountering and extracting meaning from cross-connected flows of aural, textual, and graphic, and digital information through global networks.” To be able to reflect on a situation and provide with interventions that will benefit the contemporary society and grant a legacy for future generations is perhaps the most important role of design disciplines such as architecture. In 1954, during a lecture entitled “What is a Designer?”, Alvin Lustig (Heller & Lustig-Cohen, 2010) clarifies the responsibility of designers and the purpose of design; Design is related in some way to the world, the society that creates it. Whether you’re talking about architecture, furniture, clothing, homes, public buildings, utensils, equipment, each period of design is an expression of society, people will respond most warmly and directly to those designs which express their feelings and their tastes.

In a time when physical entities are competing with their virtual equivalents, one cannot disregard the importance of mutual co-existence between them.

The role of architecture is to define its strategy, both at the scale of the city and the scale of the building. It does this by acknowledging the contemporary realm and providing the public with spaces and places where the new era will allow them to thrive. If architects are about to analyse and practice architecture in a context increasingly affected by digital information, there is clear incentive that they should consider as a paradigm the designed physical spaces that have been the containers of information for centuries. Malcolm McCullough (2008, 65) notes that; “Meanwhile, if there is any place that you can tell the difference between

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floods of raw information and the architecture of selected information, it is the library.” Correspondingly, architecture should not neglect the opportunity that occurs from the other side of the spectrum, the one of bottom-up information.

Harnessing the mediated power of virtual spaces and aligning it with the enduring presence of physical space – given that both of them are here to stay – seems the only way to make the best out of the two worlds.

Progress The signs of change have rarely been accepted as a consequence in favour of humanity from the beginning. In contrast, human nature is rather hesitant when it comes to the adoption of a new technology. This derives from the influence of well-established existing technologies. When mastered, the analogue system of information retrieval that has previously existed provides ordered, controlled and highly relevant information. The availability of real-time information, does not guarantee homogeneity with human nature nor a continuum of its sensory system. Perception is finite, so is time. In addition, the demand for speed, mobility and lightness are constantly challenging the boundaries of size and efficiency.

As a result, materials, practices, and relationships are rapidly being replaced by digital equivalents. The demand is for software. Hardware is becoming obsolete.

The potential loss of its precedented referential is seemingly being questioned, in terms of the consequences. When hesitation in embracing digital technology shakes down and more people begin to use the virtual medium, what will be created is a critical mass of users affected by both virtual and physical networks existing in both cyberspace and the urban realm. Architecture provides the context within which people live. It is destined to understand the human needs that are being shaped, and create the circumstances out of which the human species will continue to develop and evolve. + Valérie spent her nights trying to find information on Cavafy and his poetry. During the day, she would devote herself in research about number theory. She shared an office with three colleagues studying other areas of mathematics. Diane was about the same age as Valérie.

She was good-looking and interested in all kinds of activities. It would not be rare to see her rushing to Latin dance sessions, right after she had finished

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rowing practice. Christian was equally energetic. In fact, most of the times they would spend hours with Diane in participating into every party or special day that the university colleges would organise. He was a member of numerous committees and extremely popular among peers. Alexandre was the most mysterious member of the triad. Quiet and polite, he divided his time between mathematics research and cultural happenings. He preferred a vintage style for his outfit, so Christian used to call him by the names of historic persons.

The three of them had never gone out with Valérie, regardless of them inviting her often to join them.

Their most usual meeting outside the office was taking place randomly outside of a café, or in the street.

That day was not an exemption from the rule. As soon as it was time for them to leave the office, each one went toward a different way. Valérie was eager to continue the routine she had put herself into. Cavafy, poetry and the quest for the unknown commentator were targets she would not easily quit looking for. She could see the circles around her eyes bolder every day due to the lack of sleep, but she was determined to solve the mystery.

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5 Reading Matter

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Valérie felt that everything that could possibly be found on the Internet about Cavafy and his poetry, she had found during her late-night searches. Most of them she had saved on her laptop computer hard drive. For some, she would write organised notes in a notebook she kept for this purpose. She occasionally reread the poetry book she had bought the previous weekend, in an attempt to visualise how the unknown commentator would look, what were his thoughts when writing the note, and the reasons behind leaving it in the forgotten drawer.

The aim had been shifted. It was not about the poetry as such anymore. It was clearly about the identity of the author behind the note. That was the reason she had gone on the web-page of the university library and asked for copies of poetry books that had Cavafy’s Addition inside. The poetry librarian asked questions.

Valérie provided answers. The librarian arranged that she would consult the books that Friday morning. The truth was that all she was looking for was a book that was missing a specific page. Had she found it, she would ask for the list of people who had looked at it before.

She was hoping that if she found the book and the list, the latter would have not been that long. Then, the task would be to go backwards in time on the list, and find that for which she was looking. While walking toward the library, she avoided thinking about her next step in the event everything did not work out the way she wanted it. Instead, she kept a slow pace and had an eye on the contents of each shop display she was passing by.

At first it was a central bookshop that got her attention with its colourful array of popular reading matter.

Books of all sizes and on every possible subject were on display. Recipes, biographies of semi-famous people, the latest best-sellers, even devices on which one could read digital pages flickered in front of her eyes. A faint smile appeared on her lips. She thought

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of how impressive it was that people were buying books about themes that up until a moment before were not in their interest just because the cover was of a vivid fuchsia, or the proportions of their dimensions were irregular. Her thoughts were interrupted by the acute smell coming out of the adjacent sandwich shop. Freshly baked baguettes had been in an olfactory dance with the brewing of the coffee. All her smell sensors focused on that combination. She almost tasted melting butter on the bread, followed by a brief sip of espresso to conclude the morning gastronomic symphony. She forced her pace, only to discover that there was music coming out of the classical music shop. Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird added an almost dramatic amatory tone to her day. So ecstatic was she about the piece that she nearly tripped on the homeless man who frequented that corner. Nevertheless, she was not affected by this. On the contrary, as soon as she touched the rough stone to prevent from falling, she could not help returning to the moment of her first kiss outside the door of that very college. She would have stopped and started her ordinary day-dreaming about the night she would never forget but the library entrance was only a few steps away and her unexpectedly brisk walk had by now brought her into the main foyer.

ValĂŠrie showed her library card to the receptionist and walked into the building. She made a right turn and headed toward the Languages Reading Room, where she had arranged to meet the librarian. He was waiting for her, next to a low pile of books. After the proofing of her identity card, he granted her the freedom to look at the books. She went to the same page, volume after volume. No page was missing out of any book. She spotted the edition of the book that the page she possessed was part of. She started reading the poem. There was no comment at the bottom of the page. ValĂŠrie sighed. At

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least she knew that it was a relatively new publication.

That meant that her quest would not go beyond a certain time in the past. She got up from the chair in which she was sitting. Her breath became deeper, almost as if she wanted to inhale the air of the Reading Room, in case that would help her make the right decision on how to move forward. The librarian came. Valérie asked him whether those were all the books in the university libraries that she could have access to. He replied affirmatively. There was something about that man. Not only had he shown a special interest in finding what she had asked him to look for but he seemed willing to further help her with anything she needed. Alas, Valérie did not ask for anything else. She thanked him and made her way to the door; the one she had used to enter a few minutes earlier.

“There is always the Poetry Library in London if you want to check there for whatever it is that you are looking for”, the librarian said in a rather loud tone.

“Thank you for that”, Valérie replied. A joyful grin formed on her face once again. A phonecall to the office and a bus ticket purchase later, she was on the bus on her way to London. / We lend libraries the qualities of our hopes and nightmares; we believe we understand libraries conjured up from the shadows; we think of books that we feel should exist for our pleasure, and undertake the task of inventing them unconcerned about any threat of inaccuracy or foolishness, any terror of writer’s cramp or writer’s block, any constraints of time and space.

(Manguel, 2009, 290) In his book The Library at Night bibliophile Alberto Manguel (2009) maintains that people choose their way through endless library shelves , picking volumes for reasons of appearance, the name of the author, a word in the title, a feeling, a premonition on the content, the mood they are into at that moment, even a

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mistake, or a misunderstanding about something that was said. In the light of this, each and every book on the shelf is possible to be chosen by a reader, allowing them to experience its world. There are many ways to appreciate a printed book.

Each individual page creates a space of its own. The patterns of ink on the paper suggest that reading a printed page is primarily a sensory experience. The colour of the typeset and images, as opposed to the colour of the page, mark a space of visual negotiation. Its subtle smell lays the scene that the content is going to be heard, either through reading it silently or when a word or more escape from the mouth. The texture of the paper contributes to the tactile ensemble in the hands of the reader. Most importantly, all these relationships between the book and the individual happen at the level of the body.

The subliminal – which is the level on which the mind is capable of feeling (Burke, 2008) – enters the equation at the request and ability of the reader. This is the power that readers exercise upon a book. Information gathering, ordering, cataloguing, interpretation, association and transformation is the trajectory that is proposed by Manguel (2009). That trajectory is contained within the path from data to wisdom that was outlined in Chapter 4. Acquiring information from a book might be the same for most readers. The edition might be the same. The publication might be the same. Even the volume can be the same. The ordering of information is mainly a matter of education. Thus, it can also be common among those who have been educated by similar systems. The point where the result changes radically is the point of understanding. In the words of William Blake (1917/ PoemHunter, 2011); “Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read’st black where I read white”. Interpretation may be the turning point, yet the starting point is actually equally bold argues Machiavelli (1961, in Manguel, 2009, 190); When evening comes […], I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and I am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, for which I was born.

There I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the course of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexations, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass into their world.

In the attempt to transfer the routine of Niccolò Machiavelli into the

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contemporary western reality, one would notice similarities and differences. The reading time remains the same, although a reading period has been introduced during the transportation from home to work and vice versa. Mud, sweat and robes have been significantly dwindled and the passing into the book world is characterised by two kinds of interfaces, the physical, which has not changed a lot since the sixteenth century and the digital, which is a whole new invention.

The Rise of the E-pub (-lication) The illusion of the immortality of information that the digital era brings, along with the devices that support it have rendered reading into an ancillary undertaking; an act that is generally accepted as pastime and does not contribute to the common good (Manguel, 2009). Sliding the finger on a tablet touch-screen is far more intuitive than clicking the left or the right mouse button, but it is less so when compared with the original act of turning a page. The same happens with text as such. When the emphasis is the visualisation of a certain piece of writing, rather than its posting, the relationship between the reader and the text is, at best, not as comfortable as it used to be with a physical book. By having the same format with each other, texts begin to lose some of the attributes that were evident in their old form. Texture, smell, variation are all sacrificed for speed and economy of screen space.

In an article written in February 1992 in Library Journal, subtitled “The End of Books�, Raymond Kurzweil (2001) predicts that by the early twenty-first century books will be obsolete, although their persistence will remain, aided by the longestablished history of their production processes. Geoffrey Nunberg (1993), an American linguist, and professor at the Berkeley School of Information anticipates that by the same time, books in the traditional paper-and-ink form will be produced only as luxury gifts, or collector items. The fact that the readers have a lot greater role in the reproduction of text than they enjoyed in the previous days of the book, resembles the medieval scriptorium tactics for Nunberg (1993).

Texts are copied. They are also downloaded, transferred, displayed, printed, and electronically borrowed. Their individual readers access and manipulate the texts in such a way that the final output, if one can be determined, differs radically from the one the next reader defines. Using the term transclusion, which was coined by Ted Nelson for the Xanadu project, Ian Feldman (1990/2) explains how the e-media can evolve beyond blogging;

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Transclusion is a way to include, to quote, parts of a document without losing its current (or any subsequent) contexts, and without it becoming a physical part of the new text (which could be a movie, hyperfiction document, you name it). In this fashion one might see all newly formulated or recorded texts, data, sounds, pictures as future ‘boilerplate paragraphs’ or fragments, available for viewing, digesting, and transclusion in new works.

And then these fragments will be available cheaply, instantly, and in principle to all, because there will be no one deciding who might or might not be a worthy commentator. In present-day times the possibility of quoting, adding to, or paraphrasing someone else's work is always a function of access, time, and effort spent searching for the relevant parts, a process that by its very definition limits the possible number of contributions and contributors. It doesn't have to be that way.

As soon as the constant presence of the Internet is added to the system electronic publications become inclusive of all available media. The fact that the medieval scholar-monks used to define hell as a state of constant present (Manguel, 2009) may be a mere coincidence.

Looking at the news publications, the inclusiveness of their electronic version has provided the history of information with an important milestone. According to the Project for Excellence by Pew Research Centre, the Internet has surpassed television, and printed newspapers and magazines as a source of news in the United States of America (Watters, 2011). The shift of interest of users in forms of information other than text is illustrated strongly in the results of an on-going research project that looks at the usage of virtual space in the USA. Video and peer-to-peer applications are thriving, while the Web, e-mail, and other actions are being significantly whittled away (Anderson & Wolff, 2010). Personalisation of the received news is also available via the Internet. By using a family of feed programmes called RSS (Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary), users can specify their own content, delivered on their preferred device at any time of day. Applications like Pulse (Figure 5i), Zite, or Flipboard offer a variety of interfaces that can be used for RSS feeds. They do not only provide headlines and content by well known sources. They can include news by friends, collaborators, or other people of interest, all in the same virtual environment. They are also enhanced by satellite applications, namely Instapaper, in which the users can save the entries that are of greater interest to them. Both RSS readers and “read later” applications allow for the social dimension of information by providing users with the ability to share what they are reading, find people that read similar texts, contact

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Figure 5i - Pulse RSS reader for the iPad

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them and exchange views. The fact that those services have zero, or a relatively low, non-recurring cost for the users makes them even more attractive. Their characteristics differentiate them radically from the experience of popular search engines. The user can get cheap and personalised information, that can share among friends and enhance them via social value. Neither do users need to think like search engines, nor do they become disoriented or flooded.

Digital books (e-books) are now starting to borrow some of the characteristics of Internet news. Interactive areas on pages, and pages that include videos, or slide-show components are used more and more. It might be that reading a book or a newspaper might have lost some of its performance qualities and perhaps its educational projection towards younger readers, due to that lack of performance (Lange, 2011). According to a sales report by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), e-books are gaining ground in sales against printed books but the book market itself remains almost uninfluenced by that preference fluctuation (Savov, 2011). As long as people need books of any form, libraries need books of every form. Do people really need libraries though?

The Physical Dimension of Information Space One of Jorge Luis Borges (2000/1941) most well-known stories, “The library of Babel”, is a description of a perhaps infinite space that contains all possible books.

Someone interested in finding a specific book should attempt to follow the line of the least resistant to locate it. “To locate book A, consult first a book B which indicates A’s position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity” (Borges, 2000/1941, 84). Not one book in the library is the same to another.

Their difference might only be a comma or a space but there is a difference.

Unavoidably, only a percentage of the books make sense. The rest of them do not.

It is the finest example of a library that contains both everything and anything.

The contemporary library, “as a repository and dispensary of knowledge, in an age in which real power is increasingly associated with information” (Bloch & Hesse, 1995, 2) has not reached the point at which it can contain everything. Regardless of its form, physical, or digital, it can neither contain anything as well. But it is a growing entity. And its ambition should be to do so. Yet, unless a diminishing rule applies, there is not enough space inside any library to accommodate all the available – past, present, and future – reading matter. “Every library suffers from this urge to increase in order to pacify our literary ghosts”, comments Alberto Manguel (2009, 86). Thus, there is an intellectual path through physical space, real,

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or imaginary, that defines, and is defined by the Cartesian parameters of a library.

In the instance that a physical library is a place that contains information in both forms, physical and virtual, the need is for the library to be able to make the whole of information accessible to its visitors. In a chapter titled “Representing and Visualising Physical, Virtual, and Hybrid Information Spaces” in the book Information, Places, and Cyperspace: Issues in Accessibility, edited by Janelle and Hodge (2000), Michael Batty and Harvey Miller maintain that in order to explore the common ground between physical and virtual space accessibility of each should be defined as an individual term. Whereas physical proximity is the defining parameter of the material world, the virtual world greatly discounts it. “Instead, virtual interaction cost relates to factors such as network capacity, server capacity, and current load; these translate into the latency (delay time) experienced by the user. Another cost is the difficulty in navigating the space and extracting useful information” (Janelle & Hodge (eds), 2000, 133-138). It becomes apparent that libraries need to balance their function according to the virtues of both worlds, especially due to the dissimilarities they bear. The complete ignorance of virtual components within the realm of a library would not be in line with the needs of the era. To completely abandon the idea of having physical books in information spaces would not be smoothly adopted by the users of those spaces either. Neither would an institutional approach make a decisive step toward the making of the twenty-first century library space. The matter is much more complicated than that.

The American Paradigm Michael Seadle (2002, 6-7), editor of Library Hi Tech journal, makes it clear that it is not a matter of addition of one kind of facility and subtraction of another; “Libraries will grow emptier if they offer mainly pre-laptop seating, too few workstations, and do not create an ambience where the physical space matches the cultural space of modern technology.” In the same editorial, he goes through ergometric and environmental characteristics of library spaces, notably seating, lighting, and screen contrast, to conclude that libraries can no longer be considered as book-warehouses with reading rooms attached. Professor of Interdisciplinary Technology and regular columnist of Library Hi Tech journal Morell Boone (2002c, 465) also insists that vision does not necessarily mean “privileging one form of media over another […], but rather attempting to balance media in favour of the end user.” In an interview with Boone (2003), design

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consultant for libraries, Andrea Michaels notes that equally significant to the space characteristics of a library is for the librarians to understand its collection and how it is used. Consulting on the architectural matters comes second to that.

Dr Harold Shill (in Boone, 2002a) of Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg discusses that even the moment after a library is built, changes can appear that could make it better. Users keep asking for more group study rooms, and spaces that enable active and collaborative learning. That was his criticism on his own project – the PSU “cybrary” as he calls it. In addition, architect Tom Findley (in Boone, 2002b) focuses on the ubiquitous, yet concealed presence of technology in learning spaces and the space that virtual information has to share with the printed word. He also mentions the interactivity of architecture – in order to be able to absorb future demands – as well as the natural light qualities that spaces of this kind have to provide. In addition, he makes a remark on the necessity of commons, that is, rooms that are equipped with high quality static and mobile furniture, café, and relaxation areas which intend to provoke encounter and interaction between the readers.

It turns out that when referring to library design the most prominent aspects of it concentrate on traditional architectural features; light and gathering spaces.

The latter enjoys literal and metaphorical implications. Illumination could apply to physical space, as well as to knowledge and thought. Architect Jeffrey Scherer (1999) stresses that akin to the history of architecture that can be traced through the means to control light, the essence of libraries is also determined by daylight, both by means of visiting hours and reading comfort. When it comes to collaboration spaces, research and paradigms reveal that they cannot be soundly exchanged by virtual equivalents. A research programme at Pratt Institute, New York directed by Anthony Cocciolo (2010) makes clear that the scarcity of physical group working spaces in libraries does not lead users to library provided virtual space. As soon as they realise that there is not enough space to accommodate their needs for collaborative work, they tend to seek it somewhere else. Library users are willing to adapt to the spatial situation they work but will not use the digital collaboration schemes that are provided instead of physical space. As Cocciolo (2010, 534) concludes, “Despite the popularity of the Web and the exciting developments in new technologies, users continue to find ‘Gothic Architecture and big grass lawns’ as compelling as ever”. If learning environments borrow qualities from the academic environment of institutions, then spaces like library cafés, that “achieve the desired vibrancy of exchange [in terms of information] on

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the balance of monastic and marketplace characteristics included in the world inbetween” (Cantor & Schomberg, 2003, 21), are the spaces to aim for. “From Sartre and de Beauvoir holding court at their favourite Parisian haunts to contemporary reading groups meeting at Starbucks, the sociability and free play of intellectual interaction has always been a feature of the café,” claims Boone (2004, 324) in an article titled “The Way Ahead.”

Research, case studies and evaluation of previous work on libraries in the USA are pointing toward we spaces as the way forward in library design. It appears that learning spaces are re-appropriated into entities that include physical sources of information, virtual components and more gathering areas. The mere architectural qualities of those places are not significantly altered, as they still rely on ergometrics and the economy of light. Although there are many technological advances to take on board – RFID solutions are likely to mark the new library era (Mehrjerdi, 2011) – the mission remains the same; libraries should be adaptable and their function should be user oriented. Some results from the American models might be directly applicable to the European circumstances. There exist significant incompatibilities as well though. Scale of spaces and funding for the buildings are the most obvious. For example, in Germany, the governmental policy is for every region to have a library, plus several university libraries (Blume & Kempf, 2003). The total of them have a sharing policy between each other, and the regional library participates in a network with the other regional libraries. In some cases “a central library building [does] not exist at all, or its holdings [are] divided, and scattered […] across the whole city” (Blume & Kempf, 2003, 10). Only recently have they begun to create dedicated spaces for each institution, and it is evident that the old system will co-exist with the new for several ages. The space deficit cannot be solved on the same basis as elsewhere.

United Kingdom Libraries A library of straight angles suggests division into parts or subjects, consistent with the medieval notion of a compartmentalised and hierarchical universe; a circular library more generously allows the reader to imagine that every last page is also the first. Ideally, for many readers, a library would be a combination of both, an intersection of circle and rectangle or oval and square, like the ground floor of a basilica (Manguel, 2009, 138).

Etienne-Louis Boullée proposed a fantastical design for an ideal library in 1785 (Figure 5ii). Inspired by the ruins of ancient Greece, the building resembled a tunnel and had the features of a passage, rather than a static place (Manguel,

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Figure 5ii - BoullĂŠe: Bibliotheque National, 1785 (Wikipedia, 2007)

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2009). Boullée might have pioneered a magnificent library design, following perceptual guidelines, but he was not the only one who was after ideals around the same time. Henri Lambrouste, the architect of the Bibliothéque Saint-Geneviéve in Paris, applied a system for the shelves of his design, according to which the readers could pull books from either side of the shelf and from any height without having to move or use a stepladder (Manguel, 2009). Meanwhile, as late as 1832, Thomas Carlyle was asking Macvey Napier a favour, “Why is there not a “Majesty’s Library” in every county town? There is a Majesty’s Jail and Gallows there already.

You, who know thoroughly about this matter, should stir up the world to think of it” (Carlyle, 1832, n.p.). A lot have changed since then. Today, the United Kingdom possesses three national libraries, more than four thousand public libraries, over one hundred university libraries, several thousands school libraries, and nearly four thousand special libraries (Boone, 2001). According to Morell Boone (2001), the work that the UK libraries have accomplished in envisioning libraries as “hybrid” institutions – thus, including all forms of media, information commons, and spaces of casual encounter – proves that innovation originates from the singular rule for libraries: understand the users.

The public-centric philosophy within the local authorities provides that, as time goes by, the people will be gaining increasing access to the information of libraries either by using the establishments as such, or by logging in the council web space (Burton, 2008). The process involves interaction with local authority in purpose, as this is believed to evoke channels of communication and build communal ground between users and council, and among users themselves. By concentrating all local services onto one web space, the latter becomes the portal through which all social activities of the area are planned and directed, from library renewals to refuse collection (Burton, 2008). Schemes like the Axiell Arena aim to promote the integration of local archive services with related resources, via interactive personalised software and hardware hubs, in order to create communities out of a localised critical mass of users (Axiell, 2009). By adopting such strategies, local communities become part of a larger information network which enjoys benefits of broad participation and contribution.

De-localised/ Specific Libraries The current UK government appears to neglect the role of public libraries. There is no other excuse for the policy to close down libraries that do not meet certain financial criteria (Jeffries, 2010). The fact that there is the possibility for closure

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of nearly four hundred public libraries unless they start being run by volunteers rather than paid personnel (Stewart, 2011) reveals that the option of aligning certain institutions with the contemporary demands is not in discussion. The low council budgets leave no room for speculation when it comes to cuts. The first expense that has to be removed from the list is the one of running the local library. This approach was not accepted with a light heart from the public. From protests against the Victoria Library closure outside the Westminster City Hall (Eysenck, 2011), to overnight occupation in New Cross Library in Lewisham, London (BBC News, 2011), people have denounced such measures. In a time of financial stringency, libraries need to earn their way out of the closure margin and maintain a dynamic that can keep them buoyant. According to culture minister Margaret Hodge (Jeffries, 2011) the percentage of local libraries that offer e-books is less that ten per cent. If there is not enough budget for such services, it is almost certain that there is not enough financial depth for the libraries under discussion to support themselves.

There is no question of survival for libraries that have a relatively large amount of regular visitors. Their funding does not rely completely on governmental aid. Donations by individuals and groups preserves their right to continue their services. Therefore, the need to explore institutions that their survival is not threatened to define the reasoning that supports their status is portrayed as critical. The exploration focuses explicitly on physical spaces, primarily because the issue of survival applies to them. Furthermore, the mental climate that is created during reading is confirmed by the atmosphere of the space in which the reading takes place. It is about the negotiation between the imaginary space constructed during mental activity, and the already existing physical surroundings. At the end, it becomes the intersection between sensory experiences that underlie human nature and the hyper-sensory activity of the mind. In order for one to find what is desirable and specific to the mental needs, the library should be equally desirable and specific.

Consequently, the exploration relies on libraries that bear a factor of specificity. “Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads�, comments the American scholar Oliver Wendell Holmes (2006).

Thus, the library is appreciated in terms of its adaptability in current needs, its content in terms of accessibility, specificity and aesthetics. Geographically specific libraries can create information commons based on a general public that is located

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in defined areas. In other words, the interest of the people springs from their desire to participate in information related activities in the area of residence or work. Locality acts as persuasion for the embracing of the library. “The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned”, says Alberto Manguel (2009, 4) in the “Foreword” of his voyage around libraries. It might be useful for this love to be initiated by starting from shared activities and going toward mutual knowledge.

Respectively, the opposite might present an equally appealing opportunity. The love for information might prove a decisive catalyst for structuring a community based on knowledge. Libraries can be an important agent for change. Manguel (2009, 4) notes; “I feel an adventurous pleasure in losing myself among the crowded stacks, superstitiously confident that any established hierarchy of letters or numbers will lead me one day to a promised destination.”

In order to establish the area where the libraries that were going to be visited should be, a method had to be adopted. Public city libraries are far more appropriate for the needs of this exploration because the issues discussed have greater impact in urban areas rather than other areas. London is the most urbanised area in the UK, with a population of nearly eight million (London DataStore, 2010). The idea that the selected libraries should be accessible with the maximum possible equity among the London populace made their selection dependent on issues of transportation. Moreover, a catchment area defined by the first service zone of the underground train sets out a clear boundary within which libraries can be located. The Women’s Library in Aldgate East was chosen because of the specificity that its name suggests for its content. Saison Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall was selected due to the definition of reading matter that constitutes it. The London Library in St. James Square bears the name of the city and could not be excluded. The Oral History Archive in the British Library at King’s Cross called for an exploration on its scope. The British Film Institute Library in Tottenham Court Road is by definition one of various media specific content. Conclusively, the City Business Library in the heart of London City was chosen as a representation of a discipline that applies in most aspects of the life of the public.

The intention was to maintain the number of libraries up to a figure that could allow the visit to all of them during a day. The aim was to represent the itinerary (Figure 5iii) of an individual that can spend a day in the city in between libraries. An additional purpose of this was to try to measure the impact that a library could have on the preferences of a person that is introduced to it,

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rather than one who frequents it. Other than further exploring accessibility, adaptability and specificity, the very library visit experience was the one of the flâneur, who sought information stimuli out of a space that was experienced for the first time. The selection of spaces was made according to a system that contained the first attributes, whereas the nature of the flâneur clearly aimed into sensory impulses. The journal that was kept whilst in the libraries or during the time of transportation to the next one, maintains an abstraction analogous to the thoughts that were achieved inside the places of visit. Its abstract prose is enhanced by the photographs of the library spaces. Each place is annexed a word that contains the essence of its experience, akin to the way Manguel (2009) presents his addiction with libraries, by assigning suffixes such as the library as myth, as chance, as mind, as identity. When it comes to objective criticism, a library is rendered as an evolving organism, as repository and diffuser and as space.

The individual will is subjective though; perhaps too subjective. A way to turn subjective to collective is to share it with people and test its validity. However, it will hardly become objective. The remains as an attribute for issues that can be completely defined via a dual standpoint; black or white, sea or land, female or male.

The Library as Gender There is no Petticoat Lane entry in contemporary East London maps but there is the Petticoat Lane market on Middlesex and Wentworth streets every Sunday.

With a history of cloth merchants and immigrants, the market has not lost any of the two elements throughout the years. The name of the street was changed from Petticoat to Middlesex around 1830 (Harben, 2003), probably in the interests of prudery of the Georgian era. Nevertheless, the locals have maintained the old name, the one that is descriptive of the context. When visitors of the area are there other than a Sunday, they would miss the reference to feminine underwear, but would not miss the reference to the female gender. Adjacent to Petticoat Lane is an old wash house which was appropriated into The Women’s Library.

The building keeps its old façade, which is now painted over with a dark grey colour. Inside, brick, wood, plaster, and steel are in an interesting choreography with softer materials, mainly textiles. Although the sequence of movement between rooms and floors changes from small to larger there is the sense of intimacy between the user and the building. Tranquillity results both from the material configuration and the distance of the self with those materials. The

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Figure 5iii - Tube Map (The London Underground, 2011): Zone 1 and locations of explored libraries

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Figure 5iv - The Women’s Library: Cover of membership leaflet (2011)

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reading room, located on an upper floor accommodates a few dozen readers. It is washed by ambient daylight through the north windows and some roof lights.

There is also a separate reading room on the same level, the table in which often occupies groups of students doing coursework. The computer area between the large and the small room acts as digital information exchange corridor, as well as a buffer zone for the two areas.

Covering the history, liberation, suffrage and related artistic and political movement of women, the content of the library is specific and deep. Several thousands of books and periodicals, as well as hundreds of self-published magazines and objects, tell the story of women in Britain, and invite the users to experience it. Part of that experience is the large exhibition area on ground level which hosts the whole gamut of gender specific artefacts. Besides the fact that the library is reference-only, there are quite a lot of virtual archives that one can access from its website. The latter content is continuously updated, and the collaboration of the library with the Video Art Database (VAD) has allowed for short films and banners to be accessible between members and non-regular users. Among the events, talks, and debates that are organised by The Women’s Library, guided walks receive the larger attendance, especially by non-members.

Externalisation of information is an important matter, because of the agenda that the library has (Figure 5iv). Either by following the traces of campaigners for women liberation in Kensington or the murders of Jack the Ripper, the peripatetic shared learning through the city of London via The Women’s Library is a feature that takes advantage of its own archives and the settings of the city to invite more people in an information gathering. In this way the flâneur is granted the opportunity to perambulate assisted by the guides from the library who have assumed the paths before.

The Library as Assistance There are a lot of ways to approach the British Library (BL). Its location is characteristic of the connectivity of the English metropolis. Either on a bus, by train or via the underground, commuting towards BL is made easy and comprehensible. One could wake up in Paris or Brussels, travel to London through the Eurostar, arrive at St. Pancras International in less than three hours, consult the archives of the library, which is a five minutes away, and return to the place of first departure within the same day. The haunt of Antonio Panizzi stated in a report about the BL dated 14th July 1836 (Manguel, 2009, 297) is evident in the space

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Figure 5v - Twitter activity indicator in BL

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of the library; I want a poor student to have the same means indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry, as the richest man in the Kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that Government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect.

His vision became realised. The hub spaces of the library are packed with people of all ages holding a book, working on their portable computers while having lunch, or having a cup of coffee or discussing matters that interest them.

As expected, the building is of a considerable size. Although the exterior would suggest a visitor expect a complicated and confusing interior space, the clarity of materials inside tells an alternative experience. Visual contact with the routes that can be followed and clear signing make things a lot easier. The presence of the public and the unavoidable noise of the traffic makes one appreciate the sound insulation of the reading rooms. Staff is literally everywhere; assisting the users.

The exhibition on the lower level would make Panizzi happy. It incorporates the collaborative space of the future, with casual seating areas, supporting a relaxed food and drinks policy. As expected, it is filled with liquid crystal displays and touch screens, as well as data indicators for social networking websites (Figure 5v).

Most importantly, it is free to explore and work inside of.

Of all the collections and archives, there is one that stands out, due to the media that is selected for its communication. On the second floor of the building, within the Humanities department lies the Sound Archive. Essentially a series of computers equipped with the catalogue and a set of headphones, its presence is understated, while its value is important. It could be said that it is of an aid to people with impaired vision, or hearing, and that alone would prove its beneficial role. However, more than half of the workstations allocated for the Sound Archive are occupied by immigrants trying to further understand the country in which they now live. Listening to its language, appreciating the flow of words, and identifying their pronunciation through the various accents, while learning a share of its history – or education, or legal system, or science – is of a tremendous help. That is even more important since you can acquire the transcript afterwards to study in private. There is one more outstanding quality to the Sound Archive. It is the diffuser of stories; not written narratives but unedited stories, as they were told. According to Walter Ong (2004, 199); “Print replaced the lingering hearing-

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Figure 5vi - Peter Bruegel the elder, Children’s Games, 1560, oil on canvas, (Games

Museum, 2010).

According to Pallasmaa (2005), the painting is an example of the city of doing.

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dominance in the world of thought and expression with the sight dominance which had its beginning in writing.�

At the point where an individual is not considered literate, because of their origin, diminished sensory system or even due to the lack of attention to text, oral speech can provide the altera pars to learning. The visual field is paramount and necessary in order for a holistic approach to a subject matter. What it does not include is the necessary mode of internalisation of information. The latter is valuable to successful comprehension. Juhani Pallasmaa states (2005, 49); “Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omnidirectional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creates an experience of interiority.� When a library, or, in the case of the British Library Sound Archive, a department of it, respects anatomical, ethnic or other minorities, it acts as an aid for them to enter a greater total. It provides them with the means to overcome their anxiety about the information they cannot acquire. It is almost certain that it acts as a decisive catalyst for the benefit of a society that can gather and look at issues as a whole.

The Library as Attitude When a business related library is located in the heart of the economic life of a city, its surroundings confirm powerfully its role. The City Business Library (CBL) is situated in Aldermanbury pedestrian street, in between businesses, banks, and the places that cater for the people that work in the greater area. It shares the same complex with Guildhall Library. The fact that an archive of information on London and the English Isles co-exists in the same space with an archive of businesscentric matters is mutually beneficial for the institutions.

The building and the spaces allocated for the libraries, do not give the sense that one is in a remarkable place in terms of architecture. On the contrary, there is an air of modesty and humble materials. The high aggregate concrete is a neutral backdrop to the wooden shelves, and the floor. It hesitates before the flat white ceiling in order to allow for maximum diffusion of light. The triangular bearing arches are more of a practicality than a design feature and bely the era of construction. Practicality continues to manifest on furniture, static or mobile, and its spatial arrangement. The strongest features of the space are at the points where the full height of the windows allows views and daylight entry, although the latter is limited by the surrounding corporate buildings.

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Regardless of its modesty, the reading room is full of users. The welcoming policy of the library authority balances the appeal of the space. Students of all ages gather around the desks to organise work. Others work on their portable computers and some work individually. What radically changes the density and composition of the place are the workshops that are held there on an almost daily basis. Most of them are fully booked on the library website much earlier than their due date. Themes like Strategic Social Media, basic business skills like Presentation Skills, or even miscellaneous subjects like How to use photography to promote your business were among the most successful in terms of attendance during March 2011. The fact that they are usually admission free and the collectivity of the coverage acts as an attraction for numerous members of the public.

In a discipline that deals with the foundation, management, and well-being of businesses of all kinds and amplitudes, openness, and freedom of sharing explicit knowledge is critical. CBL might not be the ideal environment for a library in architectural terms but it certainly creates a climate of debate and mutual knowledge. Its windows might be incapable of providing relaxed views washed in daylight but its relaxed atmosphere opens windows for collaboration, understanding between professionals and new-comers. The library might not be praised for its floor or wall finishes, dramatic lighting or tactile furniture but it is a paradigm of efficiency and action (Figure 5vi). “A building is not an end itself; it frames, articulates, structures, gives significance, relates, separates and unites, facilitates and prohibits. Consequently, basic architectural experiences have a verb form rather than being nouns” (Pallasmaa, 2005, 63).

The Library as Identity Tottenham Court Road defines a greater area in Central London which is popularly regarded as a commercial district, if with a tendency for computer cable shops.

The film theatre on the main road betrays the location of the British Film Institute (BFI) library. The building alone does not stand out among its vicinity. Neither would the interior of the library. The BFI library will be relocated to the main Southbank site due to cost-cutting measures (Shoard, 2010). “It’s not a good period for us, as you can understand” (Delaney, 2011), an apologetic librarian mentioned while explaining the situation for the Institute. The existing reading room is able to accommodate nearly twenty individuals at best. Little room for shelves – most printed collections are stored outside the room, or even the building – and even

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less space for desks and computers, users still make the most of the space. Judging from the noise they produce, the users, mostly students of Film Studies, seem to know each other in the room very well.

Collections and archives about British film and television constitute the collection of the library (Figure 5vii). Of great importance are the films and videos held by the BFI National Archive, which are available for viewing on site by demand.

Databases and archive materials are amongst the services that are offered on their website. In order to be able to access the virtual or physical media that the library houses, the public have to become members. In addition, an online community of researchers has been created through the library network. The Moving Image Research Registry hosts over seven hundred researchers and invites for more; even students of relevant studies are welcome to share their dissertation with others (BFI, 2011). Thus, the role of the BFI library is to maintain proximity among those who pursue the creation of film and the film industry, and to preserve the rich archive of the latter. In the scenario that their planned digital-on-demand service (Shoard, 2010) indeed generates revenue, the planned costly works will improve the accessibility of the archives. The exploration of boundaries through the creative skills of film can provide an alternative point of view to the brain malnutrition of random online videos. The hosting of the 25th Lesbian & Gay Film Festival by BFI is an attempt to touch on matters largely ignored by the majority.

Juhani Pallasmaa (2009, 42), on the negotiation between vision and touch, states, “Vision reveals what the touch already knows. We could think of the sense of touch as the unconscious of vision. Our eyes stroke distant surfaces, contours and edges, and the unconscious tactile sensation determines the agreeableness or unpleasantness of the experience.� Film, as the most revealing visual media, has the power to provide a reply against the binary manifestation of right and wrong that western education has been cultivating for ages. In this way, members of society that are rendered invisible to others due to sensitive issues can acquire visibility. A library of representational media may as well represent groups of people that are otherwise neglected, despite their contribution to the making of the identity of a liberal city like London.

The Library as History Being at the north-west corner of St. James Square in Central London The London Library inhales the history of the city daily if only by location. To name a library by the name of the city it belongs geographically within is a move that requires

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Figure 5vii - Telegram that Dirk Bogarde wrote to director Joseph Losey after completing Accident (1967), a witty study of simmering class conflict and sexual tension (BFI, 2009).

Part of the Special Collections of BFI.

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Figure 5viii - The website of The London Library (2011)

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confidence. If the nature of it makes it less an exaggeration, and more of an act of coherence, it becomes a successful statement. Continuously extending its premises towards the Duke Street on the west and Mason’s Yard on the north, the library is adding more space to house its collection and readers.

Beyond the Victorian façade exists an interior of unique atmosphere. Either in the various reading rooms, or where the stacks of books are located, there is an extreme contrast of light and shadow. The materials used are natural. The prevailing presence of wood is evident in all rooms. The timber tends to absorb light due to its warm colours and rich texture. As a result, the sources of artificial light that are relatively close to surfaces like desks, or walls, almost mark areas where there is something happening. One can estimate the density of users in the reading room, only by looking at how many individual lamps are turned on.

In the same manner, the areas of circulation and administration are signified via the change of light level. It is not only the light that gets absorbed by the surfaces.

Sound and noise are also treated in a similar way. The strong tactile textures of the book bindings are decisive for that. The exuberance of the bound volumes becomes the only seductive material in that sense.

As soon as users subscribe to the library, they are granted the freedom to use the facilities, including the borrowing of books that sometimes are original publications dating over three hundred years ago. The subjects vary from Literature and Fiction, to Science, Arts, and Architecture. The electronic database of the library is available both on site and from personal computers. A considerable amount of electronic journal subscriptions is acquired to contribute to the content of the library every year. By the addition of JSTOR periodical database only the library added over five hundred periodical titles to its collection (The London Library, 2007). Despite the antique nature of its interior, the institution is friendly to digital technology. The wireless Internet connection that is provided for free within the establishment, as well as its policy on electronic reading material prove the interest toward accommodating the evolving nature of digital information (Figure 5viii).

In many respects the essence of a city is to be able to reinvent itself according to the route of its history. Keeping pace with the advances of technology and knowledge is critical in order to maintain an enduring state of provision to the citizens. In the same manner, The London Library preserves the texture of the

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city within its archive, but aims to involve its users to participate to a trajectory for the future. By expressing its age through the use of natural materials, by demonstrating its origins via its collections and by portraying the increasing number of users and information through the continuous expansion to adjacent spaces, the library confirms its invaluable role in supporting the readers of The London Library.

The Library as Culture The taste of the apple [...] lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way [...] poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book.

What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.

(Borges in Hirsch, 2000, 29) The Saison Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Poetry Collection is a dedicated space at the south-east end of the Southbank Centre. It is housed in the Royal Festival Hall and it overlooks the adjacent Hayward Gallery. The collection numbers nearly one hundred thousand items all related to poetry; all published in Britain; all of which are available for reference and loan. The archives range from books, to periodicals, journals, as well as audio and visual material. A great number of collections have been digitised – or are published in digital form – and are included on the website of the library. Access to digital media is also facilitated on a dedicated space on site. The young readers of poetry and aspiring young poets benefit from a division of the library exclusively for and about them.

The penetration of poetry into the contemporary realm might not appear an easy task. However, the library succeeds exhibiting an inventory of ways to integrate poetry with the present, and relates it to the needs of the users. The virtual space that is available on the Internet offers services that could only be possible upon a visit to the physical space of the Saison Poetry Library. Of great significance are the services that one can contact a librarian through the Internet. There is also a Lost Quotations Service through which one can define the origins of a phrase used in poetry. The Global Poetry System (GPS) facilitates the identification of geographic locations related to poems and its interactive function brings together readers and poets from all around the world. In addition to the competitions and events that are organised, that invite the public to participate, there is the Write A Rhyme (Figure 5ix) service on the website. On this application the user can compose a virtual poem and send it to whoever they want to add. Creation of poem and

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Figure 5ix - The virtual poem application on the website of Saison Poetry Library (2011)

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selection of audience are fundamental when it comes to tacit knowledge.

The services provided by Saison Poetry Library are content specific. They make that content accessible and are adapted into both virtual and physical practices.

The building benefits from its vicinity and the context in which it is placed. The user seizes from being in a space of cultural value, as well as close to catering facilities. In a way, the poetry library rhymes with its surroundings and functions and the rhyme is directly transferred to its users. There is no odd element in the composition; neither do some characteristics stand out. The whole entity is one of parts integrated to the functioning of each other. There is an effective comparison with poetry. Conversely, it acts as an effective paradigm for society per se.

The Library Genre Information is represented in various forms. However, the perception of it is acquired through the human sensory system. Either in material form, sensual or virtual, the body receptors are enabled to experience it. Interpretation and subsequent associations require mental activity. The form of information does not affect drastically the means it is perceived, or the notional apparatus that results. As far as the message is adequately integrated, a book remains what it is; its pages might be material, or virtual, but the content stays the same. The sensory experience of the book may well be enhanced by the materials from which it is made or the inclusion of alternative media and cross-referencing relationships.

In addition, relevance is likely to be generated by the social dimension of information. Since there is the opportunity for the individual to personalise the amount and quality of information that is received, the potential takes a dynamic mode of growth. The availability of the information architecture that is on discussion enables people to narrow down their options in terms of the specificity of data they receive. In addition, it brings them in contact with others who have like interests. Multiple channels of communication exist and aid the creation of more precisely structured social networks with stronger relationships between the participants.

Libraries are not excluded by the whole system. In fact, they are a significant part of it. The evolution of information affects their evolution as well. Contrary to the role they had been assigned in the past, as mere containers of archives, libraries can act as the connecting points of the system. For the libraries discussed, focusing on specific matters enables them to create gatherings of users within their

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premises and concentrate them toward common achievements. Information acts effectively as the enabling substance. The focus on a particular kind of literature which dwells mainly on a notional level can acquire further significance due to the area it is situated. Saison Poetry Library is in an open negotiation with the happenings in its surroundings, despite the fact that their content might not be exactly poetry. It becomes part of an arrangement within which the individual can derive pleasure by accessing various forms of art. In the Library of London, on the other hand, there exists a concentrated form of knowledge which is an archive of the history of the knowledge that characterises a city. In so far as the information within the library is associated with the broader urban tissue that contains it, it becomes an evolving organism. In a way, the record of the history of London is fleshed out by the city as such. The existence of other forms of media to register the representation of the urban realm is equally important.

This is why expressive media should, by definition, be open and available for the urban dwellers to experience. The existence of the BFI Library and its continuous enhancement is the means for the public to be introduced to filmic matters.

Financial support is another dimension of the preservation of knowledge. If a space provides its occupants with official or unofficial qualifications to pursue the strategic placement of their business, then it provides the society with the device to make steps forward. The existence of City Business Library and its workshop services is a catalyst towards the hands-on understanding of the economic model of the time. Part of every model should be groups of people that, for one reason or another, cannot enter it as equals. The scope of gradually incorporating them is closely interwoven with the need to provide them with the skills to effectively communicate with the rest. Assistance with that, via hearing, is available in the Sound Archive of the British Library. Enabling the participation option for anatomical, ethnic or sensory minorities is an unquestionable parameter of the homogeneity of the society. The latter does not mean that flatness is the aim.

On the contrary, celebrating differences between people gives them the chance to appreciate one another and accept the demographic texture of the city. The Women’s Library celebrates the female gender, just as any other space should celebrate difference, supporting its representation in society.

Analogy The role of the featured libraries for the sustainability of the communities they represent is crucial. In a report for two case study public libraries entitled “Augmenting communities with knowledge resources� (Pang et al, 2008, 190),

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the institutions under study are described as the “custodians of community memory.” Indeed, when public libraries are integrated with the social structure, they constitute a continuum of knowledge. The latter is inducted to members of the public via dyadic or group relationships. Subsequently, it is possible to grow the infiltration of a specific library to the body of interested users. Despite the fact that the Internet upset the balance of the information culture during the recent years, libraries have found a way to co-exist with the new medium. In many ways, the Internet enhances the libraries rather than dooming them to obsolescence.

It is a matter of policy of the libraries whether they will be condemned or thrive in the Internet age. The editor of the Library Journal Andrew Albanese (2006) maintains that the role of the library is different compared to that of the Internet.

He adds that context, learning, community and improving the quality of the question are the characteristics that describe the library as an institution. His main argument is that search engines, namely Google, are not the Internet, and that the real challenge for libraries lies within the realm of virtual social networking.

“Books, after they have been given a shelf and a number, retain a mobility of their own”, notes Manguel (2009, 163). It is not only the library books that join the social networks by changing hands. The World Book Night is an organisation that prints several thousands of books per year and distributes them for free, on the condition that the readers will pass the book to another reader as soon as they finish it. Their event in Trafalgar Square at 5th March 2011 celebrated the sharing of forty thousand volumes from a list of twenty five titles. Attached to the virtual social networks that were created for readers, such as Goodreads through which they exchange views on books they have read, exist schemes that their exchange is material. Both means contribute to a reader culture that is reflected back to libraries by definition. Once again, the medium of information is proved not to disturb a long term literary ecology. At first, it was the software that was rapidly threatening the hegemony of the hardware. Then there were nested groups of software that could access multiple platforms of data simultaneously. Mobile applications – apps – now share the same space with software that they have threatened, on hardware that have only changed shape and size. In the same way, virtual services that are supposed to menace the material world of libraries will eventually co-exist with them. It might be that the aggregate of the material will be different. Social networks are material; their matter is people.

The future will reveal more and more apps. The Big Apps 2.0 competition that was

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held in New York in March 2011 awarded prizes in entries that were dealing with, or at least harnessing, the architectural environment (NYCBigApps, 2011). NextStop is a location-based aid for train commuters. NYCPlanit is a trip planner that can be customised according to the preferences of the user. Museum Without Walls allows virtual visits in public space art. It could be argued that such applications make parts of architecture obsolete. Is there the need to care about optimised circulation function for a train station, if a portable device will notify how and when the correct platform should be approached? Likewise, is there a need to go to the park, if its contents are displayed on the hand-held ten-inch touch-screen?

Conversely, in the same way that the question was applied for libraries, do people need architecture? According to Mitchell (2005, 4), “As conversations unfold within particular architectural settings, they build up increasingly dense webs of shared understanding grounded – at least in part – on the points of reference that these settings afford.” The architectural setting might be the library, the train station, or the park. Conversation might be paralleled with any other locationspecific event. An individual might receive wireless data on top of Primrose Hill while overlooking the skyline of London, or in Notting Hill while the Saturday Market is on. Even if the message is a simple omg! - “oh, my god”, in text message manner – the context will give it a unique meaning. The issue is not to make a choice between service and architectural setting but to make the most of the two combined. Since place retains its power, space will continue to be attractive to people. Still, its qualities might need to change. Architecture needs to find the means to claim human presence in its spaces in the time when its importance is questioned by the presence of digital technology.

The meaning of libraries is post-informational, just as the meaning of architecture is beyond built space. In the words of Juhani Pallasmaa (2009, 11), “[Architecture] directs our consciousness back to the world and towards our own sense of self and being. Significant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings. In fact, this is the great function of all meaningful art.” When the interpretation of a piece of information remains a mere result of an individual mechanism, by being isolated from the opinion of others, it is likely to be closely related to misunderstanding. The traditional role of the library is an example of that. Ideas are contained in books, yet their importance lies on their application on the social tissue. In the same manner, architecture cannot continue to express spatial configurations that are not used by people, in the excuse of avant garde intentions or in the name of certain tropologies. Its role needs to be

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established as the one of a discipline which has the sheltering of collective human activity as a priority. Its survival does not rely only on financial means, like the survival of libraries. Although funds are important for its existence, what is mostly important is the value that architecture provides people with. Feedback from the social network is the main force that keeps architecture progressing. Poiesis, is the Greek word for poetry, yet at the same time, in its original language, its meaning is the one of making. Architecture can, thus, be associated with poetry through the meaning of poiesis. In the words of the architect Peter Zumthor (2006, 19), “In my youth I imagined poetry as a kind of coloured cloud made up of more or less diffuse metaphors and allusions, which, although they might be enjoyable, were difficult to associate with a reliable view of the world. As an architect, I have learned to understand that the opposite of this youthful definition of poetry is probably closer to the truth.” / She showed her return ticket to the driver, and made herself comfortable to the seat. Most seats were empty.

It was well after peak hour. Most people were already at home. Only a few needed to use the bus at that time.

Valérie was looking forward to returning to her room.

A day that started with optimism and continued with hope ended with great disappointment. The words of the librarian were still swirling in her head; “We only focus on poetry published in the Isles, dear”. How could she not find that out before going there? She had not found the courage to stay for a while. She did not leave the building from the same door that she entered it either. There was no need for stupid superstition anymore. She started walking in the city with no apparent destination. Having the river on her left hand side, she kept going till she found the first bridge and crossed it. Her pace was slow and uncertain. Valérie had only a dull image of the streets she was trying to lose herself in. The poem returned to her. How could she possibly fall for something like this? She blamed her simple mind for not keeping the promise she gave to herself. “I will never-ever believe that a premonition

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will change my life.” That came after she had broken up with her last boyfriend. He might have been the one responsible for the kiss outside that college door and for many other moments that she would never forget. Yet, leaving her for someone else with the excuse that his dreams did not match hers was something she would never forgive. What did he know about her dreams, anyway?

Maybe that was the problem, after all. She repeated the promise once more.

The path she followed brought her to Covent Garden. She adored that place. She could get lost in the shops, hunting for curiosities and spent hours there. Then she would have lunch to the sounds of a street musician.

She would definitely have a coffee afterwards; perhaps a desert, as well. But she did none of these. She stayed for a while, went around the square, felt that her mood did not fit in the place and left. It is doubtful whether she would ever be able to trace her path, but, somehow, she arrived somewhere between Chinatown and Soho. She noticed that it was the time when everybody had finished work and started the weekend. The smell of beer and food coming out of the pubs did not disgust her this time as they used to. It was easier for Valérie to keep going forward when nobody was paying attention to her. On the other hand, she would love to join in, meet people, eat and drink with them and then leave. But she did none of these. She was more confused than in need of socialising. Some hours after her initial departure from the poetry library she was on the bus heading home.

She opened her laptop and the screen woke to the webpage that she was looking at when she arrived in London early in the afternoon. It was the home page of the library she visited. She clicked on an online application which was meant to be used by people who wanted to write a poem on the Internet. Valérie started

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picking the words that were available in the application and put them in the right order. She had managed to finish the poem just before the bus arrived to her destination. It was not that she wrote something on her own. She spent her time looking in the application for the particular words that Cavafy used for one of his poems, which she memorised eagerly. As soon as she clicked on “Done� the application asked for a list of recipients for the poem. She chose to send it to her colleagues, whose email addresses she could remember by heart. A minute before she got off the bus, the sent email read, THE CITY You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.

Another city will be found, better than this.

Every effort of mine is condemned by fate; and my heart is -- like a corpse -- buried.

How long in this wasteland will my mind remain.

Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look I see the black ruins of my life here, where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted."

New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.

The city will follow you. You will roam the same streets. And you will age in the same neighbourhoods; in these same houses you will grow grey.

Always you will arrive in this city. To another land -- do not hope -there is no ship for you, there is no road.

As you have ruined your life here in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.

Constantine P. Cavafy ,1910

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Alexandre was walking to the office in a rather upbeat mood for a Monday. The coffee in one hand and his bag on the opposite shoulder did not make his pace slower.

Although he knew that he had a long day ahead, he was happy. The fact that he had just got a message from Christian saying that Diane and him would not show up at the office, made him more relaxed. It was not that he did not like them. On the contrary, he would go out with them at least a couple of times each week. But they would go to bars or restaurants or concerts. He did not have a problem when speaking there. In the office, there was no music or noise. He was not good with chatting.

With Valérie it was different. She was also from abroad, so whenever they were talking together none of them would notice any odd phrases. It was not that the others would pick on that. He was just feeling uncomfortable.

Yet, that Monday was different. He had even arrived five minutes earlier than usual. The door was open.

“Good morning, Valérie. Aren’t you a bit early today?”

“Good morning. I wanted to do a bit of the work I had left behind on Friday, and delete some e-mails I sent to everybody.”

“What e-mails?”

“You ‘ll see. You arrived before I started deleting them.”

“Write-a-Rhyme app? Have you been to the poetry library?”

“Yes.” “Do you want me to delete it without reading it?”

“No, it’s fine. Everybody else will see it anyway.”

Alexandre read the poem word by word. He looked like he was indulging in every line. He even nodded while reading. Valérie laughed.

“What?”

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“Sorry Alexandre, it is you that should be the one laughing.”

“Why?” “I feel a little bit embarrassed.” “... Are you into Cavafy?”

“Do you know about him?”

“A bit.”

“I see.”

“There’s a poetry night tonight, and I’m attending. I think they are reading Cavafy, among others. Would you like to join me?”

“Where?”

“Does it matter?”

“What time?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not really, I was just taking the time to think about it.”

“It’s at the Roehampton Chess. It starts at eight.”

“Isn’t that the weird chess centre in the university campus?”

“Yes, the poetry event is in the Queen’s theatre.”

“So, we can be on time if we leave at our regular time.

Good. I wouldn’t like to work any fewer hours today.

Friday off was enough.”

“Are you coming then?”

“Yes.” “Great! Back to work now, I don’t want to make you feel more guilty.”

Valérie smiled; Alexandre as well. The rest of the day went without noticing, except for the lunch break when he was a little more attentive than usual. He blamed her joining him for the first time for that. She really felt comfortable with him. Around six o’clock, they were on their way to the train station. ¤

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Despite the revival of the term social network, mainly due to its manifestation on the Internet, the role of it has been crucial from the beginning of human history.

As early as the Pleistoscene epoch, at least twelve thousand years ago, tools and raw materials have been detected archaeologically to be part of flows from region to region (McBrearty & Brooks, 2000). Social mechanisms have allowed the migration of objects, or the techniques to produce them, well before the Homo Sapiens started to exist. Anthropological research argues that humans, and not other animals, developed social learning mechanisms and that their ability to create tribes, cities and similar schemes of social structure relies primarily on that reason (Hill et al, 2011). It appears that the observation of innovation, the evaluation of it and its imitation through frequent contact has provided humans with the means to leap to more complex forms of knowledge.

Networks have been a decisive agent for the progress of people since the beginning. The addition of more kinds of networks through evolution has simply enriched the inventory with more possibilities. There are networks that are responsible for water distribution and others that facilitate the sharing of forms of energy, like electricity. Some are natural, and some were created by humans. The latest advance is the one that happens in virtual space. Networks have differences between them, especially when it comes to their content. Their similarities in structure allow for comparisons and cross-references which help to understand their nature and explore their potentials.

Infrastructural networks have enabled physical connection between locations.

The fact that people are able to commute in distant areas for their own needs on a regular basis has almost inverted the ancient relationship between boundary and link. Whereas the Nolli Map depicted buildings, squares, landmarks and infrastructure to clearly provide a description of Rome, a similar description of London four centuries later can be communicated through the Tube Map. Mastering the underground is what makes people proficient of London. It might be that the most vivid memory of the British metropolis is the off-scale, colourful diagram of its prevailing network of transportation. According to Mitchell (2005), the settings for interchange that a city provides for its dwellers contribute to its function as collective memory and act as a site for shared cultural reference.

Architecture has an important role within the networks of human culture due to its authority to provide their intersections with physical settings.

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Ponte Vecchio in Florence (Figure 6i) is an extravagant manifestation of the latter. The bridge that crosses river Arno is occupied by dwellings and shops on each side. Flows of people that use it regularly are juxtaposed with the flows of tourists. There are also deliveries at the shops, and the bridge would not be the same if the biodiversity element was not evident, with beavers occasionally making an appearance. Flows of natural elements, animals, and people co-mingle in an inhabited intersection of networks. The richer the intersection, the more privileges it provides for its users. The road in the middle of Ponte Vecchio presents people to one another and offers the physical setting for random encounters. The adjacent shops attract a more specialised target group; those who are keen to buy, or look. The exclusion mechanisms are a bit more powerful for the Santa Felicita church on the south side of the bridge, whereas the dwellings on top of the shops are even more restrictive. In a strip of land slightly longer that one hundred metres, architectural settings prescribe a complex hierarchical system of accesses and flow distribution.

Urban Relationships Relationships between physical spaces are about to change at the scale of the city due to networks enabled by information technology. A report by Henry Lucas (2001) predicts increased telecommuting from home or satellite offices and even more we space in the cities to be the effects of wireless communication. He concentrates his position on post-industrial economy cities, and summarises the consequences expected into less need for new office and retail space, decline of construction for new shopping malls, revived role for the city as place to meet, live, and work, repopulation of rural areas by remote workers and the subsequent sustainability on the consuming of time and resources (Lucas, 2001). If home and workspace reside together, flexible work schedules are possible. The spatial patterns of the city will have to accommodate these changes. As soon as a situation like this starts to affect people, the urban space use patterns will begin to be inverted. Mixed zones are likely to claim larger areas with the subsequent decline of separate dedicated zones. However, differences between neighbourhoods will still persist. Local resources, natural habitats and topography are characteristics that are less possible to change. In addition, districts that do not have a relative advantage to others, i.e. stimulating attractions, concentrate lower possibility to be able to follow the others to change. Margins will still manifest, as less aspiring communities will attract less people, thus less investments. Therefore, their chances for progress via the use of digital networks will dwindle. On the other

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Figure 6i - The Ponte Vecchio bridge, Florence, Italy (mi9, 2009)

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Figure 6ii - Rowan’s project was a successful one (Rowan, 2011)

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hand, there is a rising potential for crowd funding for community projects via the use of virtual networks. Peer-to-peer economy has started to make its presence more vivid in the premise of project funding. Reports argue that the ability of Internet to connect people has passed onto the level that sharing does not only include photographs, videos, and comments (Malik, 2011).

Kickstarter is a case of people enabling other people to realise projects that could not be funded in other ways. One can post their idea about an intervention on the website of this initiative, provide a description about it and an estimation of how much it would cost. Users evaluate the intentions and choose to make donations that start from as little as one dollar (Figure 6ii). Within two years, Kickstarter has managed to break the limit of one million dollars of funding per week for the uploaded projects (Kim, 2011). Co-founder Yancey Strickler (in Kim, 2011) focuses on how many artists and creative types have flocked to the crowd-funding site because of the awareness that has been raised little by little due to each individual project. Successful petitions include education travelling for individuals who cannot afford it (Rowan, 2011) or the starting of an education camp for artists of various media (Finbloom, 2011). These are instances where virtual social networks preserve public networks, that implement physical settings. The exchange of knowledge does not stop to fund-related activities. Skype, the online telecommunication company, has launched a free international community site dubbed Skype in the Classroom to facilitate teachers find each other and share advice on relevant projects. The platform has managed to unite nearly four thousand teachers from ninety nine countries since the end of December 2010 (Wauters, 2011). The notion regarding the inversion of use patterns of urban land starts to manifest on specific premises as well. The Khan Academy provides students with educational videos that they can study at home and learn about maths and other subjects in their school curriculum. With more than one hundred thousand unique visits in each of the tutorials that are posted on YouTube, they have managed to create an online learning community that migrates its potential at school level.

According to its founder Salman Khan (TED, 2011), the incentive behind this is to shift learning back to the homes of students and enable tutoring and doing homework in the classroom in order for the teachers to better accommodate the queries of students. The sharing of knowledge via Internet and the effects of this on physical space can also be combined with the sharing of tools and materials.

NeighborGoods is an online community in the USA that makes possible the sharing of tools that not everybody can afford to own between its users (Walker, 2011).

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It turns out that communities can break the boundaries of location to actually enable physical functions to inform their localities. Transportation infrastructures are also starting to acquire wireless digital technology. The London Underground is planning to connect its stations with the Internet to facilitate crowd circulation during the Olympic Games 2012 (June, 2011). The service is going to be free of charge and will benefit tourists as well as permanent residents before, during and after the event. Networks are proliferating in the contemporary era, due to the enhancement that communication technology networks are able to provide.

The latter have managed to penetrate, intersect, juxtapose and overlay the existing networks. Cities are changing as a result of the technologies of the new millennium.

Aspirations Italo Calvino was about to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in the mid-eighties. The title of its manuscripts according to his wife, Esther Calvino, was Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Calvino, 1988/2009). He died in September 1985, before delivering the lectures and before writing the last memo, of which the title is believed to be Consistency. What a truly marvellous opportunity it would have been to have that title with the others. The book relies on paradigms from literature to provide a framework for the approach of the current millennium.

Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity compose the intention of the society for the current era. It will remain in limbo whether the exact meaning of the memos is to be achieved or the importance lies on their structure and capacity like most pieces of writing for which Calvino is responsible. The contemporary society has experienced an unprecedented lack of weight in its objects. Speed is its defining characteristic. Exactitude is praised, although its pursuit can never be completed by definition. Visibility is partially achieved via relative transparency, although the virtues of the latter are still questioned.

Multiplicity is governing production issues across the globe. Consistency is the quality that humanity is after since the beginning. Calvino has managed to leave a timely legacy that is fit enough to apply to the issues of contemporaneity decades after its production.

In the current appropriation of the original ideas, their application is on both physical and virtual objects. As such, the scope has been shifted in order to accommodate the electronic manifestations of actions, which the memos touch briefly. Kevin Kelly (OreillyMedia, 2011) maintains that there exist six ideas

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that should condition the new Internet. During his talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco in March 2011, he relies on screening, interaction, sharing, flowing, accessing, and generating to provide a frame within which the new form of the media should exist. Screening implies the proliferation of screens and the subsequent necessity for one item that would incorporate all. Interacting refers to the use of the whole body to enable the functions of interfaces. Sharing is an enhancement of the current mode of sharing in order to include more elements, such as location and real-time media. Flowing is used to describe the streaming of data that is rapidly replacing previous static form. Accessing, not owning, is the ability to use something for a limited time and then return it. Generating promotes the creation of original material that cannot be copied. Deriving from the mind of a man who respects natural evolution and information technology equally (Kelly, 1995), these ideas are tools to explore their applications.

As the discipline that is associated with both the material and the virtual world, architecture can position itself between the ideas of Calvino and Kelly, as long as there is a spatially defined context and its representative feature. Michael Batty (2002, 1) argues that, “It is possible to conceive of cities as being clusters of ‘spatial events’, events that take place in time and space, where the event is characterised by its duration, intensity, volatility, and location.” Indeed, if a singular element is sought to adequately describe the urban realm this is the event.

The Position of Architecture By harvesting data from the manifestation of urban happenings, the discipline acquires the knowledge to extend its definitions to new and unusual fields.

Archetypal uses are going to be programmed into spaces that have not previously encompassed them. The challenge of understanding how ancient experiences are going to be injected into the urban environment in order to enable the public presence relies on networks. Their intersections call for the application of functions that will provide the opportunity for social groups to encounter one another and overlap. The analysis of the arising activities will help define the genius loci of each particular area, thus, what is unobtainable elsewhere. The evolving synthesis of these practices will provide the contemporary rendering of flexible, diverse and humane spaces. It is, then, a matter of feedback evaluation whether the intervention of settings was successful or not. At any case, either with the wisdom of success or with that of failure, the point is to return to the original position of data harvesting to reinvent the architectural self and keep progressing.

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The scheme is no different to the one suggested by the theory that underpins the path from data to wisdom. What differentiates it is its shape, which is neither lineal like the discussed diagram, nor circular akin to the concept of history proposed by Wright (2007) in Glut. It is supported by both of them. The catalyst that implies its shape derives from the nature of urban environment.

Cities are living organisms and, as such, are informed by the natural logarithmic spiral, whereby each step is informed by the previous and informs the next in a continuous expansion. That is the reason why each final step leads to the first one, which has, meanwhile, shifted to the next “orbit�. The only lineal element in the material world as it is known is time, yet it is equally crucial for reasons of reference, record and for the composition of statements as an association of it.

The point is not to create a vast model of associations with which architecture will manage to predict the evolution of society. A venture like this would be condemned to failure as soon as one parameter fails to give feedback to the model due to an event that could not be anticipated. What will establish the discipline as a competitive and protective agent for society would be the provision of a strong position towards the apiece situations that affect the cities and the ability to reflect on these in a way that pledges the continuity of the species.

Elements of Position Looking at the trajectory of information since the first known proofs of it, one can distinguish milestones that have left a permanent mark in the history of humans.

The forming of tribes, which lead to nested groups, and the subsequent gathering of their members in cities from the very beginning of the existence of Homo Sapiens has triggered the sequence of events of which the contemporary humanity is only the latest witness. Politics, economy and religion have been proven important influences. Their significance bears the fact that they have facilitated technological advances that kept the production, communication and sharing of information into a continuously improving course. Since the birth of theoretical thought took place, it was unavoidable for the journey within the depths of information to start. Formal ways for communicating information were added to the gestural and oral ones to create a component which remains inextricable to people ever since. The mind, perhaps the most complex of the organs that the human body possesses, along with the sensory system that is attached to it, have often become areas of exploration. Biology and related domains have spent a vast amount of time and effort in the attempt of its decoding. Their results, although

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quite informative, have failed to provide answers for a series of questions. This does not underestimate the research that exists. It rather proves the depth of the knowledge that is needed to describe the mind and the perplexity of the organ as such. However, the need of the species for computational aids lead it to invent information technology, as a sector dedicated to the electronic manipulation, storage and distribution of data. The Internet is only the current trend of this instance. What makes it so important for discourse is its rapid adoption and use by the majority of people that are introduced to it and the subsequent implications that it has on their lives. As virtual spaces are created online, virtual relationships become their consequence. The latter include both primary, secondary and more distant kinds of contacts. Physical relationships and the places that encompass them are rapidly being replaced by their virtual equivalents to the point that the mere existence of some is threatened.

Architecture is deeply involved in this matter, as it is the eminent discipline that deals with the making of spaces. As the purveyor of the settings in which human relationships take place its role is to evaluate the apiece circumstances and provide people with the means to overcome the issues that arise. In order to identify the characteristics of the current situation, the premise of the library was chosen for exploration. Its role was dual. On the one hand, it is the institution that is most closely related to information and knowledge. As such, it could contribute to the pursuit of the essence of information and how that is perceived by people.

On the other hand, libraries are on the top of the list with endangered building types due to the change of the form that information is accessed and retrieved through the electronic media. The findings of the exploration in selected urban libraries conclude in the importance of the social network as the motive force behind their survival. Presence of people appears to be the most significant agent for the presence of even more people. The reasons that guarantee the original presence are part of a plethora of attributes, namely spatial qualities, specificity and accessibility in various ways. An attempt to theorise this in the scale of the city calls for the intersection of urban and virtual societies. The role of the architectural discipline is the examination of the current minute, along with the aspirations of the society as a whole.

Abolishing unilateral approaches and focusing on the real needs of humanity, architecture should adopt the timely model of knowledge in order to maintain its significance. Instead of concentrating its efforts in formal suggestions, it should

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reside with society in order to learn from its existence. Rather than providing schemes in which people would be obliged to live, architecture should inform its processes by the current social ferment. It would then acquire the momentum to build its own position – one that should be constantly associated with the dynamics of urban events. In this way, the adopted approach will be part of the life cycle of the instances of the city, constantly evolving with its context. Cities are living organisms and the disciplines that affect their future should be able to be part of the same unity. Six ideas for the next step for the urban manifestation of architecture take the form of a suggested position. They are based on the content that was built during the study of the aforementioned premises. They contain instances of the aspirations for the society that Calvino (1988/2009) and Kelly (2011) previously stated. The six ideas are the parts of a single position and are regarded as a continuum. Alas, their order is lineal to be accommodated by the medium of text and to illustrate the notion behind any narrative.

Trail The implication of appreciating what is already present, along with the aim to provide the circumstances for innovation is deeply rooted in the notions of trail and trail-blazer. This presents the idea of respecting the history of place, people, and practices and provide the pledge for the continuum of evolution. It is, thus, interwoven with reasoning for intention, as well as the measure of capacity of the body that will host the intervention. Depicted in this idea are the notions of screening (Kelly, 2011) and visibility (Calvino, 1988/2009) and its purpose is to provide with the standpoint from which an element is viewed from inside, rather than from outside. Therefore, it is relative to the practice of tasting a particular cheese, or olive-oil or wine to understand the origins of its preserve, and assume what the content can provide. Conversely, it represents what happens in a specific unity.

Induction The query on the reason that something happens finds a response in the coexistence of introduction with the means to continue the effect. The idea of induction is rooted in interacting (Kelly, 2011) and quickness (Calvino, 1988/2009). It contains both the hierarchical ideals that govern traditional forms of learning, and the practicality that is implied by bottom-up pursuits. Hence, there are lessons to be taken from the Internet, as well as from the ordered sequence of focal points.

The issue of participation is what is under examination. The preparation for doing,

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and the provision of tools to gradually build communities with common scope is what underpins this idea. It is a calling for a gathering ready to accept diaphony and willing to promote the non-existence of absolute right or absolute wrong.

Effusion The measurement of flux, along with the externalisation of emotions and feelings that underlie the critical mass that is created or served is the objective of effusion.

It derives from the suggestions for sharing (Kelly, 2011) and lightness (Calvino, 1988/2009). The increase of bandwidth and proliferation of transclusion in the digital applications are both anticipated and praised. Parallel to those should be the assuming of community, neighbourhood or borough as the non-Cartesian manifestations of space. The point is to abolish the fragmentation of the urban fabric and attempt the revocation of socio-cultural boundaries to the point that it can be achieved. By this sort of engagement, the protection of vulnerable domains is enhanced and a more organic respect of the society is promoted, by means of feedback.

Relevance Attached to the idea of effusion is the aiming for proposals that make sense when placed among their surroundings and between the people that exist within.

Context, in terms of the built or the living milieu, is what relevance is after. Flowing (Kelly, 2011) and consistency (Calvino, 1988/2009) are the origins of this idea. It is founded on the sustainability of demographic and natural resources and supports their importance for the locality. Its content is neither about mere popularity, nor based on deliberately concealed relationships. It operates on the premise of anxiety with clarity and frames the resource of attention by sorting crossconnected flows of physical, virtual, and notional elements.

Organisation An idea that applies both to the material including bits and the notional apparatus, organisation accrues from accessing (Kelly, 2011) and exactitude (Calvino, 1988/2009). It implies structure and the constructs that define it. It can be described as the taxonomy and classification of visible and invisible networks, with the purpose to define the interconnections of those. The latter is not an end in itself, as the significance of it is to enable direct and immediate engagement with unknown premises. Hence, the aim is for remoteness to acquire the benefit of proximity through exact access, despite physical, ethnic, or anatomical intervals.

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Poiesis The supreme idea behind any form of art or craft is poetry and making, or rather, the poetry of making. It implies generating (Kelly, 2011), as it contains the notion of achieving the authenticity of what is unobtainable elsewhere. It assumes multiplicity (Calvino, 1988/2009) as the accumulation of iterated entries. Contrary to the current auto-generative techniques of the digital script, poiesis considers people as the theme of its questioning. It aims for visceral and sensory experiences that have the quality of individual stories, rather than the flatness of massproduced directions. Poiesis derives its rhyming from trail and relevance, sources its protagonists from induction and effusion, and claims its tempo from organisation.

Therefore, it is inclusive of a gamut of matters, be those organic, inorganic, virtual, or notional.

Matter Matters As the evolving hexahedron of ideas suggests a conclusive position for an architectural beginning, the final word should not consist of yet another reference to libraries, shapes, and numbers; in spite of the fact that the mind goes to Borges (2000/1941) and the hexagonal representation of the universe through the “The Library of Babel”. There is something else that plays an important role in this story. Its meaning depends on a series of circumstances. The capacity of the individual mind and the intentness with which it is read might affect its depth or importance. Alternative visual constructions of it might occur depending on the emotional or mental condition that the reader of it is. The purpose for which it is read as well as the reason behind the decision to read it would certainly generate a number of dissimilar understandings. The magic in “The Library of Babel” lies in its ability to enable the individual mind to create the opportunity of multiple realities that represent its own nature. Put differently, by declaring Cartesian space and time as infinite, the story allows for the existence of other dimensions.

The latter might take the form of universe or god (Borges, 2000/1941), but they could also be the constructs of other imaginative approaches, such as hypersenses or even binary equivalents of physical entities. The means with which the individual acquires information affect its knowledge by definition. For the contemporary individual, physical and virtual space contribute jointly to this knowledge. The shaping, validation and preservation of the acquired knowledge as common experience take place through social networks. Architecture, as

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the purveyor of physical space, provides the protected environment within which events and experiences enhance the knowledge of society. The levels of abstraction that the individual mind carries are more effectively communicated in physical spaces, or by referencing them as with the story of Borges (2000/1941).

Regardless of the type of the atoms, the distance and the forces between them, matter still exists in the form of bits, material or flesh and it still matters. Mind, its notions and the ideas that derive from it are informed by that matter. In the words of Zumthor (2006b, 85); “The magic of the real: that to me is the ‘alchemy’ of transforming real substances into human sensations, of creating that special moment when matter, the substance and form of architectural space, can truly be emotionally appropriated or assimilated.” ¤ Valérie took a seat opposite Alexandre in the bus, just as she had done on the train. He said that it was a short journey to the campus and that they would use the south east entrance, as it was the most beautiful in terms of the surroundings. She certainly understood what he meant as soon as they approached it. Nature was overwhelming. It was starting to get darker and all she could see were the gentle shapes of the trees and the little lights appearing from the quaint buildings.

They went through a garden to a small lake in which the reflection of the surroundings was starting to merge with the dark colour of the water. None of them spoke a word.

Alexandre had his usual thoughtful expression and seemed calm to her. Valérie pretended to pay attention to the spectacular shadows in the lake, yet he was almost sure that she was nervous about something. He thought that perhaps her not being used to such events made her anxious about it. When it was time to go, he started wandering slowly towards the Chess. She followed him with a smile, as if she was approving his decision to go.

Valérie was a remarkable chess player according to her father, who had been her constant and only opponent.

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Her anxiety about the place was partially because of the memory of her slow vacation days when they used to play with her father in the back yard. She thought that it would be nice to go back for a couple of days to see her parents and her sister. Maybe she would arrange it for the next weekend. The smell of their kitchen at the house she grew up returned to her once again. The path that lead to the building interrupted her mind travel.

Made completely out of a plastic material, the skin of Chess blended with the path towards it, with no clear definition of shape, neither a specific determination of what was a wall, and what was the roof. Valérie imagined the pieces sliding from corner to corner in a choreography of moves that lead toward a definite checkmate. She asked Alexandre to take a picture with her using her mobile phone.

“Beautiful.”

“Indeed.”

“Have you been here before Alexandre?”

“A couple of weeks ago. Another poetry night.”

“You are into it then,” she smiled. “... Do you want to see the King’s theatre? It’s double the size to the one we are going. If you are lucky enough, we’ll find people playing.”

“Bien sur.”

Although they took a devious inclined path that changed levels all the time, Alexandre seemed to know very well how to lead the way. They arrived at a kind of inner courtyard with several dazzling series of evolving concrete staircases. Valérie started to wonder whether she had stopped day-dreaming and the succession of voids, concrete and levels was real or not.

“Are you coming? The best view is from the top row.

Prepare to climb the rotating steps!”

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Each step was a different move, each position a different angle. She could clearly look inside the theatre now, a dedicated pair was playing. She could see the room below as well. People having a drink. She was at the last step. Alexandre touched her shoulders gently.

“Are you OK? You look a bit lost.”

“I’m fine. Just enjoying the place. Photo?”

“Only one, it’s ten to.”

“One is enough. Smile!”

The way she fell into his arms was an unprecedented event for both. Alexandre did not expect her like that.

She seemed so distant. Valérie did not believe that she had started liking him or that she acted this way. She used to be closer to him, than she was to the others but never thought of him in that way.

“Back to the courtyard, then to the level below, then up, then down, a glass of wine for the reading time, then down, then up!”

“Seriously now?...”

“Oh yes.”

Diagonal path after diagonal path, and square after square, she felt like she was participating in a chess game. If only he could... no, she would not even think about it. A dozen or a bit more had already been in the theatre. A girl was reading a poem Valérie could not understand. When she finished, people clapped. Then the next orator went to the middle of the arena. He started reading something from Baudelaire. Even though the theatre was significantly smaller on one side, it still had some of the qualities of the one they had visited briefly. Valérie thought that the more neutral the

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surfaces and planes, the more one could concentrate on the game or the readings by others.

“It’s your turn.”

“For?...”

“Aren’t you reading anything tonight?”

“Do I have to?”

“Well, that’s the point,” Alexandre smiled. “Here, take my book. It’s your beloved Cavafy’s poetry.”

She took the book from his hands and headed to the reading area. She already knew which one she would read.

She noticed that she was holding a book of a relatively new edition, with an ink mark on the side. Her heart started to beat faster. She opened the book to find Addition. The page was missing. She could see the relief of the pencil note on the next page. Valérie stopped breathing for a moment. She touched the relief with her fingers, then turned the pages and started reading: CHE FECE... IL GRAN RIFIUTO A day comes to some people when they must pronounce the great Yes or the great No. It is instantly clear who has the Yes within, ready; and by uttering it, he crosses over to his honor and conviction. The one who refuses has no remorse. If asked again, he’d say no again. And yet that No — the right No — weighs him down to his life’s end.

Constantine P. Cavafy, 1901 The rest clapped. She started walking slowly back to her seat, with her head down.

“My god, you are pale!...”

“No, I’m good.”

“Sure?”

“Is this your book?”

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“Yes, I gave it to you a while ago. Don’t you remember?”

“I mean... How long have you had it for?”

“Don’t know, a year or so. I got it from a bookshop in London. Why?” “Nothing, it’s a good edition. I like the fact that every poem has a leaf on its own, none on the back pages, you know.”

“Huh?” Valérie smiled at him. They waited for the last to finish and walked to the door. She was silent all the way back home. Her eyes were looking out of the window of the train all the time. Alexandre was not very satisfied with the scene. He would expect at least a conversation.

As soon as the train stopped she grabbed his hand and started walking to the exit. It was a clear night sky in the little town, of the kind they did not see often there. He would not leave her hand. He would not even make any move of his fingers. She was also enjoying the moment. Her eyes were sparkling. He would definitely walk her to her door. She unlocked the door and turned on the light. She would not leave his hand.

“Where did you get that table from?”

“The furniture guy in the market. Why?” “I had a similar one last year. Left it outside the flat when I left for vacation.”

“You also left this inside, I think.”

Valérie turned off the light.

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List of References

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of References

Albanese, A.R., 2006. “Google Is Not the Net: Social Networks Are Surging and Present the Real Service Challenge - And Opportunity - For Libraries.” Library Journal, 131(15), p.32.

Anderson, C. & Wolff, M., 2010. “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” Wired. Available at: http://www. wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1 [Accessed March 23, 2011].

Aurigi, A. & Cindio, F.D., 2008. Augmented Urban Spaces: Articulating the Physical and Electronic City, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Axiell, 2009. Axiell - Axiell. Axiell, The Arena for Archives - Libraries - Museums. Available at: http://www.axiell. co.uk/6 [Accessed March 24, 2011].

Battles, M., 2004. Library: An Unquiet History, W. W. Norton & Company.

Batty, M., 2002. “Thinking About Cities as Spatial Events.” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 29(1), pp.1-2.

Batty, M. & Miller, H.J., 2000. “Representing and Visualising Physical, Virtual, and Hybrid Information Spaces”. In D. Janelle & D. Hodge, eds. Information, Places, and Cyberspaces: Issues in Accessibility. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 133-146.

Baudelaire, C., 2008. The Flowers of Evil, Oxford Paperbacks.

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List of Illustrations

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of Illustrations

The images on tracing paper are part of design projects that took place during the last two years. Both projects, Roehampton Chess (2010) and MindScape: ValĂŠrie (2011), have common elements in the agendas they follow.

The ideas of information, evolution, mind, thought, social networks and poiesis are depicted in these projects.

Chapter 3: Matter of Fact page 39: Homo Sapiens Britannica. 2005. Available at: http://media-3.web.britannica.com/eb-media/97/76397-004-C79D48BB.jpg [Accessed 15 February 2011] page 40: Clay tokens Schoyen. 2010. Available at: http://www.schoyencollection.com/math_files/ms4632.jpg [Accessed 15 February 2011] page 40: Sumerian writing Oswalt Academy. 2011. Available at: http://blogs.oswaltacademy.org/groups/navarro/wiki/2e50b/images/ fd3b2.jpg [Accessed 15 February 2011] page 41: Greek script Coco. 2011. Available at: http://claudiacoco.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/greekinscrip.jpg [Accessed 15 February 2011] page 42: Codex University of Michigan. 2004. Available at: http://www.lib.umich.edu/writing-graeco-roman-egypt/images/ codex.jpg [Accessed 15 February 2011] page 44: French medieval Bestiary The Medieval Bestiary. 2011. Available at: http://bestiary.ca/beastimage/img8207.jpg [Accessed 15 February 2011] page 45: Hypothetical reconstruction of the press Rutgers. 2011. Available at: http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/libs/scua/depol_images/jdp9.jpg [Accessed 15 February 2011] page 49: Otlet’s sketches for the Universal Book Wathieu. 2011. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcwathieu/4421626911/in/photostream/ [Accessed 15 February 2011]

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page 50: The Memex Wilde & Mahendran. 2011. Available at: http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i153/s11/history [Accessed 15 February 2011] Chapter 4: What’s the Matter?

Page 59 – Figure 4i: Diagram of the Turing machine University of Arkansas. 2009. Available at: http://math2033.uark.edu/wiki/images/6/6d/Turing-machine.jpg [Accessed 20 March 2011] page 62 – Figure 4ii: Apple iPad and the iBooks application Zath. 2010. Available at: http://zath.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/apple-ipad-ibooks.jpg [Accessed 20 March 2011] page 64 – Figure 4iii: Diagram: Data to Wisdom page 68 – Figure 4iv: Material from Bac-Pac Man by Greene and Barnard Archigram. 2010. Available at: http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/img/prj_thumbs/144_medium.jpg [Accessed 20 March 2011] Chapter 5: Reading Matter page 81 – Figure 5i: Pulse RSS reader for the iPad Pulse. 2011. page 86 – Figure 5ii: Boullée: Bibliotheque National, 1785 Wikipedia. 2007. Available at: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Etienne-Louis-Boullée_ Nationalbibliothek.jpg [Accessed 20 March 2011] page 91 – Figure 5iii: Tube Map: Zone 1 and location of explored libraries The London Underground. 2011. page 92 – Figure 5iv: The Women’s Library: Cover of membership leaflet The Women’s Library. 2011. page 94 – Figure 5v: Twitter activity indicator in BL

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page 96 – Figure 5vi: Peter Bruegel the elder, Children’s Games, Oil on canvas Games Museum. 2010. Available at: http://gamesmuseum.uwaterloo.ca/VirtualExhibits/Brueghel/children.jpg [Accessed 20 March 2011] page 100 – Figure 5vii: Figure 5vii - Telegram that Dirk Bogarde wrote to director Joseph Losey BFI. 2009. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishfilminstitute/5567237267/in/photostream/ [Accessed 20 March 2011] page 101 – Figure 5viii: The website of The London Library The London Library. 2011. page 104 – Figure 5ix: The Virtual Poem application on the website of Saison Poetry Library Saison Poetry Library. 2011. page 113 – Figure /01: Petticoat Lane Market 501 Places. 2009. Available at: http://www.501places.com/2009/11/uncovering-a-hidden-side-of-london-onfoot/ [Accessed 18 March 2011] page 114 – Figure /02: The Women’s Library, Exterior page 115 – Figure /03: The Women’s Library, Reading room page 116 – Figure /04: The Women’s Library, Computer area page 117 – Figure /05: The Women’s Library, Living room page 118 – Figure /06: The Women’s Library, Exhibition space page 119 – Figure /07: View from pavement of St. Pancras International page 120 – Figure /08: BL, Main Entrance page 121 – Figure /09: BL, Foyer page 122 – Figure /10: BL, Staircase

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page 123 – Figure /11: BL, Restaurant page 124 – Figure /12: BL, Futuristic collaboration space page 125 – Figure /13: London ONE, Shopping Mall by Jean Nouvel page 126 – Figure /14: City Business Library, Book stacks page 127 – Figure /15: City Business Library, Detail on structure page 128 – Figure /16: City Business Library, Sitting area page 129 – Figure /17: City Business Library, View from window page 130 – Figure /18: City Business Library, Newspaper readers page 131 – Figure /19: BFI Library, Exterior Google Maps. 2011. page 132 – Figure /20: BFI Library, Librarian’s business card attached to leaflet page 133 – Figure /21: BFI Library, 25th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival banner BFI. 2011. page 134 – Figure /22: BFI Library, Reading room BFI. 2010. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishfilminstitute/5450964762/in/photostream/ [Accessed 18 March 2011] page 135 – Figure /23: BFI Library, Reader and books BFI. 2009. Available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/library/?q=nationallibrary/ [Accessed 18 March 2011] page 136 – Figure /24: BFI Library, National Catalogue Webpage BFI. 2011. page 137 – Figure /25: The London Library, Elevation The London Library. 2011. Available at: http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/press/General%20library%20images.

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htm [Accessed 18 March 2011] page 138 – Figure /26: The London Library, Book stacks The London Library. 2011. Available at: http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/press/General%20library%20images. htm [Accessed 18 March 2011] page 139 – Figure /27: The London Library, Reading room and books The London Library. 2011. Available at: http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/press/General%20library%20images. htm [Accessed 18 March 2011] page 140 – Figure /28:The London Library, Reading room and readers The London Library. 2011. Available at: http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/press/General%20library%20images. htm [Accessed 18 March 2011] page 141 – Figure /29:The London Library, Staircase The London Library. 2011. Available at: http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/press/General%20library%20images. htm [Accessed 18 March 2011] page 142 – Figure /30:The London Library, Guiding symbols The London Library. 2011. Available at: http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/press/General%20library%20images. htm [Accessed 18 March 2011] page 143 – Figure /31: Saison Poetry Library, Royal Festival Hall from Embankment bridge page 144 – Figure /32: Saison Poetry Library, Hayward Gallery from Royal Festival Hall page 145 – Figure /33: Saison Poetry Library, Interior of lower level page 146 – Figure /34: Saison Poetry Library, Entrance to the library page 147 – Figure /35: Saison Poetry Library, Interior page 148 – Figure /36: Saison Poetry Library, Multimedia corner & View Chapter 6: Matter of Interpretation page 155 – Figure 6i: The Ponte Vecchio bridge, Florence, Italy

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mi9. 2009. Available at: http://mi9.com/uploads/landscape/4144/ponte-vecchio-bridge-over-the-arno-riverflorence-italy_1600x1200_71362.jpg [Accessed 20 March 2011] page 156 – Figure 6ii: Rowan’s project was a successful one Rowan. 2011. Available at: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/artschoolgirl/put-the-school-back-in-artschool-girl [Accessed 10 April 2011]

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