The Radcliffe Library at Oxford, designed in 1740, seems to be the earliest example in England of a circular reading room lighted from the roof. This is said to have been suggested by the central reading room of the old Wolfenbüttel Library, built about 1710.
“The first architect,” says Duff-Brown[8] “to plan a library which in any way meets the modern requirements of giving ample accommodation was Leopoldo della Santa, who in 1816 published in Florence a quarto pamphlet, which is an attempt to construct a library building entirely from an utilitarian point of view.” The plan, which Brown reproduces, suggests Dr. Poole’s plan which was embodied in the Newberry Library of Chicago.
In 1835 Delassert proposed for the French National Library a circular plan of building, which perhaps suggested the present reading room of the British Museum. In 1885 Magnusson proposed an unending whorl as a good form for a growing library.[9]
While English libraries, and those of the continent, were developing these phases of old types, separate library buildings began to appear in America. The first one actually erected for library occupation still remains in use,—the Redwood Library of Newport, R. I., built in 1750. The main room is a hall 37 × 26 feet, 19 feet high, with two lean-to rooms at the sides. A massive portico gives an impressive front, but cannot be said to found a distinctive library style.
Our early proprietary associations and parochial libraries were stored in public buildings, or in buildings with no peculiar features. The school district libraries established by the state of New York in 1835, and similar libraries founded soon after in other states, seem to have been stored in schoolhouses, though intended for public use. The state libraries, first established as early as 1773, were deposited in the State Houses. The Young Men’s libraries of the early period were kept in rented rooms, or at best in rented houses. No special phase of library buildings was developed until about the middle of the nineteenth century, when colleges began to build. Gore Hall at Harvard (1841) was modeled after King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, Eng., and was even at that date said to be “ill adapted to the purposes of a library.” The University of North Carolina “erected” in 1850 a library in the form of a Greek temple, with hall 84 × 32 feet, 20 feet high. These essays at importing styles certainly developed no models worth imitation, but nevertheless they were imitated.
Our Own Era
Our own “library age” may be said to date from the middle of the nineteenth century. The parliamentary investigations which led to the first English library act in 1850, and the organization of the Boston Public Library with us in 1852, mark the beginning of the modern library movement. I will not try to trace the gradual evolution of library buildings abroad. I do not know enough about it to handle the subject well. I find, however, in Edwards’ Free Town Libraries,[10] London, 1869, a prototype of our own “Points of Agreement among Librarians on Library Architecture.” But as late as 1907 an English architect (Champneys[11]) says that “the examples of what a library building should not be are out of all proportion to those which are worthy to be followed.”
In America, building developed with the library movement, at first getting rather ahead of it. Indeed, there were few experienced librarians to direct it, and even these were mainly the old style conservators and bibliographers. The topic of building does not appear in the discussions of the library conference in 1853. The architects had to develop a precedent. The first distinctive type to appear was adopted in the Astor Library in New York (1853) and followed in the Boston Public Library dedicated in 1858. The exterior of the building had no peculiar features, but the interior was distinctly a type to be outgrown. The main room was a lofty hall, surrounded by galleried alcoves reaching to the ceiling, storing the books, while the readers occupied the floor, into the middle of which the main stairway arose among the tables. This impressive but wasteful interior was copied in large cities throughout the country, and was referred to in contemporaneous discussion as the “conventional style.” As it was tested in operation, and as its defects both for storage and administration became evident, the library profession, then getting together, unanimously condemned it. At the Cincinnati Conference of 1882, the A. L. A. resolved that “the time has come for a radical modification of the prevailing style of library building, and the adoption of a style better suited to economy and practical utility.”[12] At first there was no agreement on a successor. Richardson, the great architect, developed a library type which was severely criticized by librarians.[13] But in the rapid growth of libraries, the problem of close, economical and accessible storage of books became acute. How could these accumulating masses be stored and at the same time used? The solution came in the “stack,” at first fiercely fought by conservative librarians, but now so universally accepted as to form the distinctive feature of modern American library architecture.