Connecting Past and Present

When San Francisco unveiled its new central library last April, the starkly modern structure, clad in white granite and shining steel, was presented to the city as an alternative to those stodgy old central libraries that suffocated visitors with dim and fusty air.

The library has gone on to draw record crowds. Many were attracted by its numerous community rooms, built to realize chief librarian Kenneth Dowlin’s vision of the facility as first and foremost “a meeting place.”

Last month, however, Dowlin was forced to resign, the victim of mounting criticism from Bay Area writers disillusioned with the library’s design. Ostensibly, the writers have been incensed by Dowlin’s decision to throw out thousands of carelessly selected old books to accommodate 300 computer terminals and literarily irrelevant designs like a soaring atrium.

What most disillusions the writers, however, is that in designing a place where people can meet in community rooms and over the Internet, Dowlin lost sight of another meeting that should take place in libraries: an encounter between patrons of the present and authors of the past. Decrying the facility’s lack of history, poet Tillie Olsen called it “a betrayal of what a public library is supposed to be about.”

The building’s designers clearly do see history as oppressive. “Old libraries told stories of power,” said chief architect James Ingo Freed. “But great tombs are no longer our forte. We needed a place for communities to celebrate their own essences.”

Freed, however, is posing a false dilemma. Buildings steeped in the past can certainly prove empowering in the present. For proof, Freed need only have looked at Los Angeles’ own Central Library, which reopened four years ago after a major expansion and renovation compelled by two disastrous fires.

From the flaming torch atop its pyramid to the richly crafted ornamental inscriptions within, the Central Library, as architecture critic Joseph Giovannini put it, “narrates a history of the knowledge it holds in the same way churches once illustrated Scripture.”

Freed and other populist architects might view these elements of architect Bertram Grosvener Goodhue’s original 1926 design as authoritarian or oppressive. But the aphorisms inscribed on the Central Library’s walls and the learning celebrated in its murals are inspiring. And the library’s 1993 redesign smartly integrates friendly modern technologies, like computerized search tools that allow users to use their own key words, rather than Library of Congress classifications, to find books.

The aim of learning, of course, is marshaling past knowledge to sort out present predicaments, and it’s a philosophy literally spelled out on the steps of the library. An art installation by Jud Fine uses the steps to depict early symbols of writing, then handwritten alphabets, then computer icons. The last step is blank, suggesting that it awaits a history still being written.

Los Angeles’ Central Library is every bit as high-tech as San Francisco’s. But while San Francisco’s is designed around its high-tech elements, L.A.’s conceals its gadgetry: a computerized book conveyance system, for instance, snakes behind walls to depositories under reference desks. Appropriately, L.A.’s Central Library views high tech as a means toward an end, not an end in itself.