The architecture of knowledge
February 14, 2008
There is a subject within the field of information science known as “information architecture.” According to the Information Architecture Institute, information architecture is “the art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability.” To me this sounds like it has more to do with filing than architecture, but “information file clerk” just doesn’t have the same ring.
But long before people made up pompous-sounding terms like information architecture, there was a more rudimentary kind of architecture (known simply as “architecture”), and this was the kind that people interested in libraries cared about. And folks who build libraries—even today—don’t talk about information so much as they talk about a related—but very different—term: knowledge.
I was first struck by the relationship between library architecture and knowledge when I visited the Library of Congress last summer. When I first stepped inside the breathtaking Thomas Jefferson building, I remember the feeling that I was standing in a monument not only to truth and knowledge, but to the ideals of a government which no longer seems to exist. What are we to make, for example, of the following quote from Francis Bacon, which sits above the statue of “Philosophy” in the main reading room?
THE INQUIRY, KNOWLEDGE, AND BELIEF OF TRUTH IS THE SOVEREIGN GOOD OF HUMAN NATURE.
Standing in the Library of Congress is what I imagine it must be like to stand at the Pyramids or the Parthenon, and bear witness to the glory of a former civilization.
This is sad. But it is assuredly glorious, and it is very exciting to see the new Carol Highsmith archive of digital photos of the library, which record in exquisite detail the splendor of this building.
The grandiose design of the library building (a “tribute for the great thoughts of generations past, present, and to be,” as one turn-of-the-century guidebook put it) seems to be representative of Jefferson’s idea of the library, when he offered his personal collection as a replacement for the materials lost when the original library was burned down by the British. In response to criticisms that the subject matter of his books was overly broad for a legislative library, Jefferson wrote, “I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”
Back home, and recovering from my lament for the demise of civilization, I am fortunate to live in a city with several impressive, and quite different, library buildings, including the bizarre and renowned Seattle Public Library, the cathedral-like Suzzallo Library, and the brutalist Odegaard Library. Each of them stands as a tribute to a different way of envisioning and representing knowledge:
The Seattle Public Library’s Central Library, described by William Dietrich as “Knowledge Breaking Out of a Confining Egg.”
The Suzzallo Library of the University of Washington, dubbed a “Cathedral of Books.”
And the Odegaard Undergraduate Library, a hulking mass of brick and concrete just across Red Square from Suzzallo.
Odegaard is built in an architectural style known as Brutalism (really!). Legend has it that this style was popular for college buildings built in the late 1960s not only because they are cheap to build and easy to maintain, but because they are fairly impervious to student rioters. (Just look at those walls of brick in front of all the windows!)
I don’t know what sort of statement this was supposed to make about knowledge.
