Writing in his column "Academia in America" (part of the Chronicle of Higher Education) Thomas Benton confesses a long time fixation with "library porn" describing a book featuring the New York Public Library as "...a beautiful coffee-table book with photos of the library's most notable holdings and, more important, a few tantalizing pictures of the library itself, showing the exquisite architectural details of the public catalog room."
Alas, while the New York Library is a major turn on for Mr. Benton, our own Millard Sheets Library is apparently the equivalent of a cold shower. Referencing the book Libraries by the noted photographer Candida Höfer, he laments Höfer's willingness to include mundane images, citing Otis as having a "...dreadful, concrete room at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. As one of the few images showing people, perhaps it is meant to convey the ugliness of so much contemporary library architecture: cheap, ephemeral, and bookless."
I suspect our Library staff might take issue with such a characterization, particularly since the space was not built as a library at all but as the areospace headquarters for IBM, having assumed its next life as a library space when we moved the College to Westchester in 1997.
07 March 2007
There's Porn and then there's Library Porn
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You're so right. As the Director of the Otis Library, I do take issue. Our library is a friendly, lively place where students gather, chat, and work. Although filled with computers, the presense of books is ubiquitous. It's not uncommon to find students sitting in the aisles with piles of open books scattered around them. The architecture may be minimalist, but that allows the activities of the people within the space to be the focus.
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