Mysteries of the Mall by Witold Rybczynski

Author:Witold Rybczynski
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429953245
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Soarin’ over California simulates a five-minute hang-glider flight over the Golden State, complete with motion, dangling feet, breezes in your face, and the smells of sagebrush, orange groves, and ocean mist. I can only imagine what Baudrillard would have made of it. I loved it.

A Good Public Building

The 1970s and 1980s were the decades of building museums. The international boom is easy to understand: the public’s interest in art was fueled by blockbuster exhibitions, the well-publicized extravagances of the art market, public-television programs, including Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Robert Hughes’s Shock of the New, and the museums themselves. It appears that the 1990s are going to see another boom in cultural building—one that is less predictable. Not new museums—new public libraries.

Los Angeles is currently spending more than $250 million to renew and expand its public library, and San Francisco is building a new 377,000-square-foot main public library. Denver recently held an architectural competition, won by Michael Graves, for a $65 million central library, and San Antonio is undertaking a similar project. Even Las Vegas, not known as a book town, has built a new public library, designed by that southwestern firebrand Antoine Predock. In Canada, Vancouver has chosen Moshe Safdie as the architect of its new public library. The French have begun work on an immense new national library, which Parisian wags have already christened the TGB, for très grande bibliothèque—a pun on TGV, the high-speed train. The portentous composition of four glass towers has become the focus of public controversy because the books are exposed to light and the public reading rooms are in the basement.

Chicago has also built itself a new public library. Some library! The Harold Washington Library Center, which opened to the public on October 7, 1991, is the largest municipal library in the country, and the second-largest public library in the world, after the British Library, in London. The $144 million, 756,000-square-foot building occupies a full city block on State Street in the South Loop. Perhaps “possesses” would be a better word, because the sturdy ten-story monolith lays claim to its place in this city of famous architecture in such a forceful manner that it already looks as if it had been there forever.

No doubt this impression is exactly what the architect intended. “It’s a building of memories,” Thomas Beeby of Hammond, Beeby & Babka told the Chicago Sun-Times. Beeby, who headed the design team, is a native-born Chicagoan, and his fellow citizens will easily recognize in the library bits and pieces of many of their favorite Chicago buildings. The cyclopean granite base is an obvious reference to the Rookery Building, designed by Burnham & Root and completed in 1888. The thick brick walls recall the same firm’s massive Monadnock Building of 1893, which stands just around the corner. The arched entrances repeat those of Adler & Sullivan’s 1889 Auditorium Building. The huge pediments on the roof and the composition of the main facade are derived from the classical front of the Art Institute, a Beaux Arts landmark on Michigan Avenue designed by the Boston firm of Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge.

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