Читать книгу How to plan a library building for library work - Charles C. Soule - Страница 15

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I was first tempted to translate epigrammatically strength, use, show, but show seemed just the effect to avoid, although the venus suggested it. The lexicon defines the meaning of venustas as loveliness, beauty, charm; and I take it beauty—plain beauty—is what we most wish to see in a library building.

“While it is undeniable that the more directly utilitarian requirements should take precedence, æsthetic treatment of a library building is no unimportant matter. A building which is a work of art is a powerful educational factor; a dignified structure commands respect; an attractive exterior and pleasing interior attract toward use of the building.”—Champneys.[17]

The eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, in its article on Architecture, says this: “The end of building is convenience, the end of architecture as an art is beauty, grandeur, unity, power.” “The most important qualities (it continues) are size, harmony, proportion, symmetry, ornament and color.” Of these, size will depend mainly on the scope of work of the library, and on the funds available. Ornament in a library is a questionable beauty. The other qualities are possible even in a small and inexpensive building. For harmony and proportion, the architect may well be allowed choice at the outset as to what general form of building would best suit the site, and accord with the environment.

I should add to the elements of beauty, material. In this the next choice after cost, should be appropriateness and possibilities of dignity and quiet beauty. Nor need the material be expensive. Expense does not always promote beauty; it often ensures ugliness. A good rule to follow is to take “the wine of the country,” as it were,—the stone of the state. Not necessarily stone, either. Unless in large libraries, why is not wood good exterior material, if the life of the building is likely to be only twenty-five years? Wood is a fine material for a small building, lending itself to easy alterations or repair, and capable of great beauty. Whoever has had the fortune to sail on Christiania Fjord or Puget Sound has brought away, as pictures of loveliness, a memory of the beautiful villas of those forest-rich shores. Even re-enforced concrete, with its vast possibilities of ugliness, has also possibilities of beauty: witness the business section of Leipsic, and the residence quarter of Hamburg. The different sections of America have various handsome and durable building stones. And every section is near enough to clay to have good brick,—by far the most sensible, and in good hands the most beautiful material for library building. Did you ever see the buildings of Harvard University? If so, you retain now in memory, not so much the gray granite of the library, as the soft, homely, beautiful, wholly satisfactory atmosphere of old Holworthy. If you can escape the bilious brick which just at present is considered æsthetic, and the other brick which exudes soda-blotches, and get the good old-fashioned kind which mellows to a ripe old age, you will please a large constituency.

As to marbles, if they are cheaper than stone or brick, all right. But if additional expense for marble will cripple or dwarf a single feature of convenience or service, I would fight it to my last breath. Perhaps I am prejudiced, by an early experience. Being in Washington some years ago, I wandered into the new Navy Department Building. Asking to see the library I was shown to a lofty, bare room paneled in marble from floor to ceiling. “Here you see specimens of all the marbles of the world, brought by vessels of the navy direct from their quarries,” said the custodian. “But where are the books to be?” I queried. “Oh, the books!” he answered, rather contemptuously; “in here;” and he showed me two slices of space, just the length of the main room, shelved on both sides thirty feet high, lighted only by a tier of single windows at one end, and each space only eight feet wide. Since then, marbles outside or inside a library have been associated for me with vulgar show, not with appropriate venustas.

As to the quality of grandeur, I am not sure that it is even appropriate to a library. Is it not some such effect that many architects have aimed at in our bad part? It seems to me that Beresford Pite was right in saying:[18] “A regard for symmetrical purpose, a largeness of proportion and form, simplicity of detail, and great restraint and refinement of moulding and ornament, are qualities characteristic of a library, internally as well as externally.... Libraries of all buildings should be freed from the trammels of a merely archæological architecture. The architect of the present day is apt to rely too simply on precedent.” Yes, witness some of our Greek temple libraries in new America.

After all, the material to be used on the exterior is largely controlled by the limit of funds and is a matter for the architect rather than the librarian, unless he thinks the cost of the outside will stunt his accommodations.