This Slashdot post asks the same question a lot of people do: “can libraries be saved from the internet?”

Slate has an interesting photo essay exploring the question of how to build a public library in the age of Google, Wikipedia, and Kindle. The grand old reading rooms and stacks of past civic monuments are giving way to a new library-as-urban-hangout concept, as evidenced by Seattle’s Starbucks-meets-mega-bookstore central library and Salt Lake City’s shop-lined education mall. Without some dramatic changes, The Extinction Timeline predicts libraries will R.I.P. in 2019.

The premise is that libraries are physical spaces used to house books, and that as books decline in importance in our libraries the buildings must take on some new, third place role. That much would be true, if libraries were no more than buildings full of books.

Libraries in early America had no buildings, just a community group that shared books and sometimes shelved them in their local tavern. Books and other forms of knowledge were shared because there was little to be gained by hoarding them, and much to learn from in discussions about them. In addition to offering important social opportunities, these early libraries were founded on the notion that lifelong education strengthened the community; that libraries strengthened the republic.

Carnegie wasn’t the only robber baron who sought wash his name in this grand notion, and the 19th and 20th centuries saw tremendous growth of physical architecture for libraries. But libraries are greater than that. Before they became buildings, libraries were the means by which a community or culture identified, preserved, and disseminated knowledge. Libraries, in short, were public information architecture. Google, Wikipedia, and the Kindle haven’t displaced the need libraries serve, rather, they highlight it. Wikipedians are perhaps the librarians of the future, shushing noisy patrons, cleaning up messes, and trying to ferret out truth amidst conflict.

The internet is indeed challenging our old notions of libraries, but what’s racing towards obsolescence, the library or our quaint notion of it?

dcdead’s photo of the Central Station of Strasbourg, France reminds me of something I’d long wanted to do in (or around) my old house: put it in a dome. Apparently, this dome doesn’t fully cover the building, just enlarges it without obscuring the facade. Still, 6000 square meters of glass looks pretty good, eh?

Back to my old house, however. Here’s the plan: forget the lack of insulation and the drafty windows (and the dying roof, before I replaced it), solve all of that by putting a greenhouse up around it. Even single layer glass would eliminate the wind and rain and make the whole house significantly easier to heat. Aside from having the possibility of a year-round lawn, it’d save a lot of fuel.

One hundred years ago the country was in the middle of a riot of library construction. Andrew Carnegie’s name is nearly synonymous with the period, largely due to his funding for over 1,500 libraries between 1883 and 1929, but architectural historian Abigail Van Slyck notes that the late 19th century was marked by widespread interest in community development, with broad recognition of libraries as a means of promoting individual development.

“For library patrons, male and female, young and old, the new library offered a pleasant surprise.” Libraries became recognizable landmarks, and recognizably public. “Readers could enter freely, safe in the knowledge that they were welcome.”

And inside the library the barriers were coming down. Where once a user needed to request materials from the librarian, open stacks became increasingly common with libraries constructed near the turn of the century. Historian Walter Langsam praised the development this way:

The Carnegie libraries were important because they had open stacks which encouraged people to browse. The open stacks were more democratic. People could choose for themselves what books they wanted to read. The libraries were meant to be for people of all walks of life.

(Van Slyck notes that Carnegie insistence on open stacks developed after the turn of the century.)

And while the widespread construction of libraries may have begun as “gifts of men grown wealthy during the [Civil] war,” they soon became valued institutions of the people.

libraries, information architecture, history, architecture, Carnegie libraries, Andrew Carnegie, 20th century, 19th century

APM Marketplace: news of a British model home. Highly insulated, carbon neutral, just 40% more$. Not just a demo, it’s going to be the law: all new UK buildings to must be carbon neutral by 2016. Economies of scale are said to reduce or eliminate the added cost by then.

carbon neutral, efficiency, architecture, environment

Compact, modular, and Lego-like housing is nothing new. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House (now at the Henry Ford Museum), designed in the 1940s, was probably the first. But the Lustron House was actually sold commercially in the years after World War Two. Though it didn’t turn out to be a commercial success, the house did show the promise of pre-fabrication and mass-manufacture for house. They even have have an enduring fan base, with websites like the Lustron Connection and Lustron Luxury, and a documentary.

Fast forward now to 1970 and the Nakagin Capsule Tower. It was developed with removable capsules — individual housing units — attached to the central column, but it’s now getting criticism in part because the aging capsules have never been upgraded as the architect imagined. So goes the life of an architect, apparently.

Criticism or not, the concept won’t go away. Today we see new designs, like this micro compact home (via We Make Money Not Art) and Wener Aisslinger’s Loftcube project (picture above).

architecture, buckminster fuller, capsule houses, capsule housing, capsule tower, compact housing, dymaxion house, habitation, home architecture, houses, lego house, lego housing, lego-like, legos, loftcube, lustron, m-ch, micro compact home, modular housing, pre fabrication