John Hadaway - Sorted? Searched? Delivered? Labroustre’s Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve

Sorted?

Searched?

Delivered?

Laboustre’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève

Written by John Michael Hadaway AAFY T2 • History and Theory Studies Word Count: 2160

Stephen Dedalus, Talbot, Armstrong, Comyn, and some faceless others find themselves exploring a boundless, encircling body of literature. They pant for stories, for ideas — for information about the self and the world. They share verses and passages, propping texts from the “[breastworks] of [their satchels].”1 Talbot eventually stumbles on a verse from John Milton’s Lycdias. He reads it aloud at the behest of the others, and Stephen is reminded, fleetingly, of an ambiguous phrase uttered by Aristotle. The phrase “[floats] out into the [library’s] studious silence”, a silence that Stephen had become familiar with.2 Indeed, the library is “where he had read” and “sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night.”3 It was his, and theirs. It was a lived intellectual refuge, a place where “fed and feeding minds” could thirstily toil “under glowlamps” and on top of long benches, together or alone, desperate for silent moments like those.4 The library — the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, designed by Henri Labrouste — is certainly idealised in James Joyce’s Ulysses, set half-a-century after the building was opened in 1851. What set of Labrouste’s design decisions resulted in Joyce’s emotive idealisation? What was Labrouste’s vision for the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève? And what does its makeup tell us about his milieu’s libraries and hierarchies, perhaps even ours? I am — and perhaps this decision will at first appear senseless — not going to start by analysing the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Rather, I am going to briefly move the focus by one and a half decades, to today, to a library that I will argue provides a clear framework for thinking about Labrouste’s: the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library in Chicago, Illinois.

The Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, designed by Helmut Jahn and opened in 2011, is a rich piece of architecture. 5 Its glass, domed facade is certainly inviting — it was not uncommon for students to speculate, in jest, about the potential disciplinary fallout from climbing on top. Perhaps more interesting than its facade, however, is its organisation. The main reading floor, the research library’s only accessible space, is completely devoid of books. And yet beneath it, out of sight, sits a collection of 3.5 million, only to be handled by a programmed acronym, the Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS).6 These two functions do not sit in complete isolation, however. There is some mediation: people can make storage requests on their screens, and the 180-seat reading room is organised, in plan, around a retrieval desk that flanks digitisation and conservation laboratories.7 With these design decisions, the demand on the library to legibly sort in space is displaced; the user, instead, is told to search from the comfort of their screen, and that the ASRS — an acronym, yes, but, more concretely, a set of robotic arms interpolating within barcodes and books — will handle the rest. Jahn’s design and storage system, to be sure, stretch the trite conception of a library as a place where users must physically and symmetrical interface with a sorted collection of books, with ordered instances of thought’s topography.

The building’s provocation of the library type is significant, not in the least because it is emblematic of a broader shift in thinking. In The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence, Mario Carpo suggests

1

James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 44.

2

Ibid., 44.

3

Ibid., 45.

4

Ibid., 45.

5

Tom Rossiter. “Architecture at the University of Chicago.” Joe and Rika Mansueto Library | Explore the Architecture at the University of Chicago (2020).

6

Ibid.

7

Ibid.

that there has been a mapping — a recent one at that — from “sort” to “search”.8 He uses the popular email service, Gmail, to make his point. He claims that its interface’s emphasis on searching for emails as opposed to sorting them has made taxonomies useless, conditioning users to leave things unsorted, rendering the idea of order in space futile.9 Indeed, if computers can search for information faster than we can sort it, why should we sort it — and why in space? The question, Carpo suggests, may have put Aristotle’s categorial enterprise to bed had it arisen millennia ago.10

reading room

conservation lab

circulation desk

digitisation lab

Joe and Rika Mansueto Library | Programme Schematic | Simplified Plan & Section | Drawn by the Author

There is certainly a sense in which the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library can be read as a “Don’t Sort: Search” design. The library’s large, invisible collection, from which users must search digitally in order to extract physically, demands that its users engage in a search exercise that is similar, if not homologous, to Gmail’s. By asking the question that modern search systems ask — why sort when this system can search far faster? — the library promotes certain qualities: efficiency and speed, for example. But in doing so, it may also demote certain ones: the importance of order in space as Carpo suggests, or the experiences of shared public space, interdisciplinary scholarship, and intellectual immersion as Anthony Grafton suggests, perhaps even spatiality altogether.11 The primacy of modern search systems does not seem to be bounded to the digital. It seems to have the capacity to affect the contemporary research library’s form and programming — for better or for worse.

Nominal judgments aside, the Joe and Rika Manuseto Library makes clear statements about search: the extent to which it yields to modern search systems in its design and programming, for one, suggests that it regards the search for information as the library experience’s most central node; the resulting censure of the importance of order in space, secondly, suggests that Jahn regards the act of search as a solitary and Mario Carpo, The Second Digital Turn: Design beyond Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017).

8

9

Ibid.

10

Ibid.

11 Anthony

Grafton, “Apocalypse in the Stacks? The Research Library in the Age of Google,” Daedalus 138, no. 1 (2009).

extractive process, not a social-spatial one. These statements about the nature of search offer a rich lens through which the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève can be analysed. Does the Bibliothèque SainteGeneviève, like the Joe and Rika Manuseto Library, hallow the solitary search of information? If not, what does Labrouste say about the relationship between search and spatiality? And what do his statements tell us about both his moment and his broader vision for the library type?

A date and a fictional anecdote, which are thus far the only two pieces of information that I have relayed, insufficiently contextualise Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Its relationship to prior ideas about the library type, particularly those of the French Enlightenment architect, Louis Boullée, demands attention. In his Treatise, Boullée suggests that public libraries are the “one subject that should please an architect, and at the same time enflame his genius.” 12 His Bibliothèque du Roi, which would later be renamed the Bibliothèque National, was an articulation of both an Enlightenment ethos and this enthusiasm. The proposal might even be read as a built polemic, which, distilled, demanded headway towards “a universal library with access to universal knowledge”, a library fit for the Age of Enlightenment’s intellectual milieu.13 He wanted to free the world of knowledge, and let it unfurl in space, departing from the medieval practice of chaining, which bounded both books and readers to specific locations.14 This vision is expressed particularly well by his “amphitheatre of books” — for him, “nothing could be greater, more noble, more extraordinary.”15 He envisaged that an open amphitheatre, which was designed to distribute people and books across rows such that books could move freely from hand to hand, would allow for knowledge to move “almost as quick as the spoken word”.16 Any physical form of mediation, it appears, was a threat to his polemic that texts and the ideas that they represent should move as the mouth does, freely and quickly, that search ought to, as the amphitheatre suggests, be an involved public activity. It follows that Boullée was not merely interested in the library as a place for storing and sorting — in fact, his proposals offered little advice about either — but also, and certainly more importantly, reworking it into a radical institution centred around an egalitarian conception of search, one that the Labrouste would later reference and perturb.

The aforementioned medieval system of chaining was, at its core, a system of exclusion. If Boullée inverted it with his proposals, championing the book and its freedom to move in space, then perhaps Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève inverted it even further with its monumental, public-facing facade. The library’s walls, inscribed with 810 names of various thinkers as if it were a catalog, make the building a dense informational artefact.17 There is certainly a sense in which the building itself can be read as a book, as a chronological directory “of the history of civilisation and knowledge.”18 Labrouste, commenting on this design decision, reasoned that the “monumental catalog is the principal decoration of the facade [because] the books themselves are the most beautiful ornament of the interior.” 19 He seems to Nan Dahlkild, “The Emergence and Challenge of the Modern Library Building: Ideal Types, Model Libraries, and Guidelines, from the Enlightenment to the Experience Economy,” Library Trends 60, no. 1 (2011), 14.

12

13

Ibid., 13.

“The Enlightenment and Grand Library Design.” The University of Chicago Library News - The University of Chicago Library (2020).

14

15

Nan Dahlkild, “The Emergence and Challenge of the Modern Library Building: Ideal Types, Model Libraries, and Guidelines, from the Enlightenment to the Experience Economy,” Library Trends 60, no. 1 (2011), 14.

16

Ibid., 14.

17

Ibid., 15.

18

Ibid., 15.

19

Ibid., 14.

have imagined his research library as an uninterrupted whole, as an unbounded public good whose principal offering was universal knowledge, and whose facade was completely reflective of this function.

Nothing is hidden. The idea of the book bleeds through the facade, and the expressive, minimal cast-iron structure communicates a similar idea symbolically.20 Labrouste, one can speculate, attempts to frame the library as a place in which users, upon entering, will be completely absorbed by the world of knowledge: its vastness, its gravity. The facade dares the public to enter a world of intellectual search, of serious contemplation. Indeed, the building’s expressiveness — of structure, of function — communicates that the library is no longer a closed institution that caters to “wealthy, book-collecting connoisseurs” but, instead, an enlightened public.21 Anyone can search, the building screams emphatically.

Like Boullée before him, Labrouste was interested in creating a public, egalitarian environment for search. His building’s expressive facade and cast-iron structure suggest as much. But the nature of that search may depend — as it does for the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library — on its details and programme distribution. In the case of Jahn’s library, for example, the uncompromising separation of books and reading space — made possible only by its technological apparatus, the ASRS — diminishes the importance of order in space: search, annexed to the flat screen, becomes a non-spatial activity.

Labrouste’s decision to decorate the building’s vestibule with illusionistic paintings of a garden is quite telling of his ideas about search. The decision was a concession, a way of reconciling the impossibility of a natural forecourt.22 Labrouste was interested, argues Neil Levine, in “[shielding the building] from the noise of the street outside and [preparing] those who came there for contemplation.” 23 It appears as though Labrouste’s ambition in his design for the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève was to frame the acts of search and reading, to create the conditions under which serious inquiry could boom. Labrouste suggests latently that search is at once a contemplative and autonomous process, and that, therefore, his architecture should minimise its interference.

The rise of platforms like Gmail marks a profound shift in the way in which we search for information.

The Joe and Rika Manuseto Library is a physical instantiation of that shift, a hypermodern cocktail of the new — the search algorithm — and the old — the research library. Labrouste’s Bibliothèque SainteGeneviève, on the other hand, is a reflection of the virtues extolled by the Enlightenment — its own moment’s shift, of which Boullée’s visions are particularly reflective. Indeed, there are a number of comparisons that we can make. One is located in Chicago, and the other in Paris. One was built in 2011, and the other in 1851. Users in Labrouste’s have the option of searching in space together; those in Jahn’s are resigned to their screens. Labrouste upholds the importance of being able to interact with order in space while searching; Jahn does not. To be sure, there is ample negative conceptual space separating the two architects’ ideas of search. The shift is marked. We lose things; we gain some others. But perhaps they are more alike than we think. They both express a desire to interface universal knowledge — as wide of a collection as their spaces permit, a problem that Jahn’s storage system solves using high-technology — with the public, and they likewise both programme the space and time for contemplation.

The second dimension, contemplation, is what we should draw our attention to. It appears to be the endpoint of search in both Labrouste and Jahn’s imagination, the place where users arrive once they have found an intellectual springboard. It is likewise the moment that Joyce describes so viscerally. Should they have been able to fight shy of ageing, there is little reason to think that Stephen and the others could Robin Middleton, “ The Iron Structure of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève as the Basis of a Civic Décor,” AA Files 40 (1999).

20

21

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, “Exhibition: ‘Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light,’” The Journal of Architecture 19, no. 1 (2014).

22 Anthony

Vidler, “Books in Space: Tradition and Transparency in the Bibliotheque De France,” Representations 42, no. 1 (1993), 121.

23

Ibid., 121.

not have shared that moment in the Joe and Rika Manuseto Library a century later. They may have had to text instead of talk — the library’s pin-drop silence and sparse tables would have made sure of it. They would have been unable to prop books out of their satchels so quickly — ASRS requests are certainly not as quick as the the spoken word as Boullée had envisaged. Loss is certain. It always is, and hopefully it leaves something for ingenuity to learn from. But the ideas that the two buildings represent are, at their core, not dissimilar. Both buildings, like their users, eagerly search: search for that contemplative moment, for someone’s writing — rigidly held by their collection — to float out into the building’s studious silence, a silence holding its breath against the infinity of possibility before it.

Bibliography Carpo, Mario. The Second Digital Turn: Design beyond Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.

Dahlkild, Nan. “The Emergence and Challenge of the Modern Library Building: Ideal Types, Model Libraries, and Guidelines, from the Enlightenment to the Experience Economy.” Library Trends 60, no. 1 (2011): 11–42. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2011.0027.

Grafton, Anthony. “Apocalypse in the Stacks? The Research Library in the Age of Google.” Daedalus 138, no. 1 (2009): 87–98. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed.2009.138.1.87.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.

Merwood-Salisbury, Joanna. “Exhibition: ‘Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light.’” The Journal of Architecture 19, no. 1 (February 2014): 156–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2014.886387.

Middleton, Robin. “ The Iron Structure of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève as the Basis of a Civic Décor.” AA Files 40 (1999): 33–52.

“The Enlightenment and Grand Library Design.” The University of Chicago Library News - The University of Chicago Library. Accessed March 23, 2020. https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/about/ news/the-enlightenment-and-grand-library-design/.

Tom Rossiter. “Architecture at the University of Chicago.” Joe and Rika Mansueto Library | Explore the Architecture at the University of Chicago. Accessed March 23, 2020. https:// architecture.uchicago.edu/locations/joe_and_rika_mansueto_library/.

Vidler, Anthony. “Books in Space: Tradition and Transparency in the Bibliotheque De France.” Representations 42, no. 1 (1993): 115–34. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.

1993.42.1.99p0173p.