ABSTRACT

In his book Architecture in Britain today (1969), the architect Michael Webb described libraries of yesteryear as ‘secular temples for the worship of learning’. The old type of library was, he continued, ‘walled-up against the outside world … inwardly a soulless barn containing serried ranks of hard-backed chairs’. In the 1960s, however, he sensed, libraries were turning away from this introspective image and were becoming ‘places of enjoyment not necessarily born of edification, demanding informality and higher standards of comfort’. Sixties libraries, Webb contended, were also ‘information warehouses’, and as such demanded ease of accessibility.1 Webb’s claims were conceivably based not only on his observation of changing interior and exterior styles derived from the rise of modernism but also on an awareness of the new spaces that were appearing in libraries (including those for culture and ‘enjoyment’) and of the importance of siting libraries (now ‘information warehouses’) close to dense populations of ‘communication age’ citizens, whether these be residents on new housing estates or consumers and commuters in redeveloped urban centres. In the 1960s, library investigators and planners increasingly argued that the traditional approach to public library design in all its aspects – style, space and siting – was a major impediment to the progress of the institution in the modern age, especially in the way that non-users found traditional built-forms ‘discouraging’.2