ABSTRACT
By the 1920s and 1930s, the planning and design of public libraries was most advanced in the US, herthe advent of the modern movement in architecture provided new opportunities for innovation. Architecturally, libraries were still closely aligned with the classical Beaux-Arts tradition of the nineteenth century, although, increasingly, their design was influenced by progressive innovations associated with the Carnegie program, and the general trend toward decentralization and departmentalization. Architecturally, the basic functional expression of the building is a direct reflection of the modern library program it accommodates. Stockholm Public Library, by Erik Gunnar Asplund from 1925, was an important transitional modern work that combined classical elements of Beaux-Arts planning and design with a new functional expressiveness that gave precedence to the popular circulating collection, rather than the research collection. In the US in the 1930s and 1940s, as modernist trends in architecture became more prevalent, they produced little in the way of public library design.
