The large round thing in the middle that I was talking blogging about.
Archive for 18 May 2003
…as a bit of light relief from strategic intent.
This is a room that was definitely designed by someone who had seen the reading room at the British Library – round, booklined, pillared and with the maddest art deco chandlier that’s completely wasted on the room because noone ever looks up at it. The whole room is a strange combination of green marble and a parqeut floor that’s been polished fanatically by men in brown coats for the last sixty years. And the architecture provides the echo – dropping a pencil the other side of the room causes everyone to stop and look up, which means that there’s very little talking going on – just a background hum of rustling papers and scraping chairs. (And my keyboard rattling.)
In the middle there’s a huge round desk about fifteen feet in diameter where the catalogue computers live – from the ground floor it’s quite hard to work out what it is, but from above you suddenly realise there’s a grating across the top – presumably it’s some kind of a ventilation system, but it also looks to me as if it’s where the mad organist rises up from. Either that or a huge library version of the control panel of the Tardis.
There’s also a smell about the place – it’s a strange mixture of old paper and floor polish, enhanced by the way that the air is so dry. It’s a quintesentially “library” smell – somehow as soon as you get a lungful you know that you’re in a world of dry academic literacy. It’s completely different from the other library on campus – that’s a seventies monstrosity built almost entirely out of grey concrete and formica, enhanced by 30 years-worth of discarded chewing gum embedded into the carpet.
Because of the way the shelving is distributed, whenever I’m in here I’m usually downstairs in the west building – to reach it you have to go to the front of the library, through the main dome section, out through a corridor into the west building, through the shelving area , down three flights of stairs and into the bowels of the building. The first time I saw the place I half-expected to find plans for a bypass stored in a filing cabinet with a sign saying “Beware of the leopard”. Walking down there is like stepping into a sensory deprivation tank – there’s very little outside light filtering down, so you’re completely cut off from the outside world. You can imagine small, grey wrinkled creatures that scuttle from shelf to shelf lining up the spines.
