St. Louis Central Library

In my last post I said that I needed to branch out to new branches of my local public library system.  On Saturday I visited the St. Louis Central Library in downtown St. Louis.  Designed by Cass Gilbert (who was also the architect for the United States Supreme Court) and made possible by a generous grant from Andrew Carnegie, Central Library was built in 1912.   During most of my life it was one of those libraries that was not meant to be used for browsing.  You looked up books in the voluminous card catalogs and put in requests at the central desk and waited for them to be retrieved from the stacks.   When you put in requests from your local branch, this was generally where they came from.

As a Girl Scout we went on a tour of Central Library.  The stacks had glass floors.  That sounds somewhat cooler than it was; they were heavy glass block floors not plate glass.  But still, it was unexpected.  Books were retrieved and sent to the main desk via a pneumatic tube system.

Of course glass floors aren't earthquake proof so when the Public Library system decided to do a $70 million renovation of Central Library the glass floors had to go.  As did all the central stacks.  It is now a "regular" library where you can browse the collection, which makes it much more user friendly.

I forgot to take a photo of the outside so here is a wikipedia photo taken before Central Library was shut down two years ago for the renovation:




Although the building looks like a standard building it actually is an oval shaped central hall that is connected to four surrounding rectangular galleries via "bridges", thus letting in lots of light to the interior of the building.

The above is the front entrance on Olive Street.  You walk into very formal space, all marble.  On either side of the foyer are stairs to take you up to other levels with beautiful stained glass windows:

Then you walk through a hallway that is really a "bridge" into the oval grand hall, where you used to have to ask for books.  I only took a  photo of the ceiling and the windows along one side:

  If all of this seems very stuffy for a library, you are right.  It is beautiful, but not conducive to browsing.  But that's ok, there's nothing to browse in the grand hall.  They will have special exhibitions and events in there.  From the grand hall you can walk back across another "bridge" to the back of the building into what used to be the stacks.

And here's where the surprise is:  A three story modern glass enclosed atrium that shows you where all the books are:

You can now enter the library from what used to be the back of the building and go right into the "library" part of the library, without having to climb up all those steps on the Olive Street entrance.

Here's the view from the main reading room back into the atrium - see how light it is:

I've read that NY is going to do a similar thing to its central library - replace the old stacks with a light filled atrium.  I've also read that it is very controversial.  All I can say is that I LOVE the way it was done here in St. Louis. The minute I walked into the atrium I started smiling.  In fact there was a smile on my face the entire time I walked through the building and all the people who were working in the building were smiling too.

The exterior of the building has famous quotes carved into the stone.  The ceiling in the new reading room has quotes on the ceiling.  Here it says "All this happened, more or less" (Kurt Vonnegut):

 It is very cool.  When I went down to see it I didn't think that I'd be so enamored of it and it didn't occur to me that I might make it my main library stop in the future.  After all, it isn't really convenient.  But it made me want to go back and browse.
As we were walking through I saw a copy of The Bookseller by Mark Pryor which I had been considering reading.  So I picked it up and checked it out on my way out!

Yes, yes.  I was going to read fewer mysteries in 2013, but I was also going to visit more libraries.

How was the book?  It was ok.  It's the first in a series and it shows.  A little too much explanation and a little too much serendipity.  I'm not sure I'll read the other books in the series but I was glad that I saw something to check out simply as I walked through the room.  Who knows what I'll find when I have time to browse? 

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

I finished Simon Mawer’s Booker Prize nominated novel The Glass Room a few weeks ago and I’ve been debating whether I wanted to write about it. I had pretty much decided not to but then I read Danielle’s review over at A Work in Progress.  That got me thinking about it again.

This is a novel about a house.  Although the characters in the novel are fictional, the house is based on a real house:  the Tugendhat House, designed by Mies van der Rohe, in Brno, the Czech Republic.  Here it is:

When Mies van der Rohe left Europe in the 1930’s he settled in Chicago.  Mies van der Rohe buildings, and buildings “in the style of” Mies van der Rohe, punctuate the skylines of cities here in the Midwest.  I’ve always found them cold and, truthfully, ugly.  So the idea of reading a novel set in a Mies van der Rohe designed building was not largely appealing to me.  On the other hand, I was reading my way through the Booker Prize nominees and this was one of them.  And it was, after all, a novel, which meant the house would only be a setting.

How wrong I was.  The house was the main character of this novel.

I’ve tried to decide if my dislike of Mies van der Rohe architecture caused me to not be engaged in this novel or if it was simply difficult for me to identify with a house as a main character.  In Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, the house was certainly a character.  But the human characters who interacted with it were established at the beginning of the novel and didn’t change throughout the novel.  It was the story of the interaction between specific characters and between them and the house. 

This is the story of the house.  The original owners, who designed and built it, appear to be the main characters for a while.  Even after they are forced to abandon the house at the start of the war, we follow them to Switzerland.  Mawer then interweaves their story with the story of what is happening to the house they left behind.  But then they realize they must leave Europe and go to America (they are very wealthy so this isn’t as impossible as it was for others) and we lose them as characters.  We do not see them past their train journey through occupied France. We do not see their trip to Cuba.  We do not see them settle in New England.  We do not meet them again until years later.  In the meantime the story of the house goes on.  But the people who occupy the house are not particularly likeable. And the house is never used as a home again.   That just didn’t work for me because I didn’t really care about the house.

Where Mawer excelled however was in describing the loving design of the house and the hopes and dreams that were poured into it.  The relationship between the couple, Leisel and Viktor, who commissioned the house and the architect who designed it is rendered very well.  It is Viktor, a wealthy Czech industrialist, who is committed to the idea of building a modern home but it is his wife Leisel, the child of a traditional, wealthy Czech family who gets caught up in the idea.  When Viktor waivers it is Leisel who insists that they will build their dream.  It is Leisel who ends up working closely with the architect and their relationship is a true meeting of minds and is fully believable.  As I read this portion I thought that Nancy Horan, the author of Loving Frank, would have written a better novel if she had been able to capture the same relationship between Mamah and Frank Lloyd Wright. 

The other thing Mawer was successful with was giving me an idea of the hopefulness of modern architecture. I’ve never thought of modern architecture as hopeful.  I’ve always thought it was somewhat depressing.  All those big spaces to be filled, all that hard glass and those stone floors and walls, all those big windows that give you no privacy.  Modern architecture seemed to me to be a metaphor for the hard, cold, impersonal 20th century.

But this house is a building full of hope.  Czechoslovakia was, in the 1920’s, a new country.  Cobbled together out of parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was a new country, full of hope.  After the carnage of World War I, it is a time of peace and calm.

Space light, glass; some spare furniture; windows looking out on a garden; a sweep of shining floor, travertine, perhaps; white and ivory and the gleam of chrome. The elements moved, evolved, transformed, metamorphosed in the way that they do in dreams, changing shape and form and yet, to the dreamer, remaining what they always were: der Glasraum, der Glastraum, a single letter change metamorphosing one into the other, the Glass Space becoming the Glass Dream, a dream that went with the spirit of the brand new country in which they found themselves, a state in which being Czech or German or Jew would not matter, in which democracy would prevail and art and science would combine to bring happiness to all people.

And as Hitler rises in Germany, the people ignore the danger.  And the house? 

The Glass Room remained indifferent, of course.  Plain, balanced, perfect; indifferent. Architecture should have no politics, Rainer von Abt said.  A building just is. Below it, lapping up to the foot of the garden, were the rough tides of those political years, while the Landauer House stood beached on the shore above the tidemark like a relic of a more perfect golden age.

But the house is taken by the Reich and used in the performance of it’s pseudo-science.  It’s purpose is converted and perverted.  It never regains it’s original luster.  It is never used as a home again.  At best it will be a museum.  

While I can’t really recommend this novel as a novel, I do think there were parts that were worth reading. Others, perhaps, would have less of a problem than I did with the house as main character.  But I just couldn’t get past it.