Rooms in an Age of Open Plans

Rose Main Reading Room, New York Public Library—perspective corrected wide shot (my photo)

 

Louis Kahn believed that the room is the beginning of architecture. I quoted him on that point in 2023, when the Eugene Public Library Foundation asked me to speak at the main branch's twentieth anniversary. Kahn held that each room deserves its own light, its own structure, and boundaries a person can clearly perceive. He doubted that anyone could truly inhabit the undivided space of the open column grid.

Libraries make the case for rooms better than any other building type I know. Consider the Salle Labrouste in Paris(1), with its slender cast-iron columns and terracotta domes; the octagonal Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress; the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library; or the circular reading room of the Library of Parliament in Ottawa. Each is unmistakably a room, with a center, defined edges, and a ceiling that gathers the space beneath it. When I sit in one, I know exactly where I am.

Contemporary libraries haven't abandoned large reading spaces, but their ambitions have shifted. Helsinki's Oodi has its top-floor "Book Heaven," an interior expanse under an undulating, cloud-like ceiling. Seattle's Central Library has its reading room beneath OMA's tilted glass. These are generous spaces, but they are open floor plates more than rooms, defined largely by a ceiling rather than by a clear sense of enclosure. In Seattle's reading room, I felt more adrift than situated. Many new libraries share this character; their interiors sometimes have more in common with airport terminals than with the reading rooms that once anchored the type.

Helsinki Central Library Oodi, third-floor "Book Heaven" (photo by Ninaras, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

The exceptions tend to be national and research libraries, where sustained reading remains the central activity. The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem (Herzog & de Meuron with Mann-Shinar, 2023) organizes its main reading hall around a void rising through three levels to a great circular skylight. Galleries, a café, an auditorium, and a bookstore surround the room rather than dissolve it.

Public libraries, recasting themselves as quintessential third places, have mostly chosen the open floor. The usual explanation is that libraries now do far more than lend books, and flexibility rewards the open plan. I've never fully bought this explanation. The downtown Eugene library is an exception, one I know from the inside. When our team (Robertson/Sherwood/Architects, with SBRA, now Shepley Bulfinch, as design partners) planned it, the program was hardly simple, yet we chose to make the building an ordered collection of rooms: large, two-story reading rooms, with the top-lit rotunda centering the plan. Programs change; that's a given. Since the library opened, it has added a "library of things" and a maker space, neither part of the original program, and both found homes within the building's fabric of secondary spaces. The principal rooms remain intact. I may be the least objective judge of what that proves architecturally.

Eugene Public Library, west reading room (photo by Eckert & Eckert)

Christian Norberg-Schulz argued that our sense of existential space begins with a center, the fixed point from which paths and domains take their meaning.(2) A great reading room supplies that center literally. An open plan asks me to supply my own. A well-defined room does more than locate me; it frames me. When I sat in the New York Library's Rose Main Reading Room, I became, for as long as I stayed, someone who reads and studies, a participant in a civic ritual of learning.

Perhaps a library meant to be everyone's living room can't afford to be anyone's center. Certainly, an open, un-walled library floor plan does serve a distinct political purpose by signaling absolute public ownership and radical inclusivity. People filling these open floors on a weekday afternoon don't seem to miss what I miss, so maybe the loss is mine alone. Regardless, I suspect rooms do a kind of work that open plans rarely do: they tell us where we are, and, while we're there, who we are.

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(1) The Salle Labrouste no longer serves the national collection. The Bibliothèque nationale moved its main holdings to Dominique Perrault's Tolbiac site, which opened in 1996 and whose long reading halls wrap a sunken garden. Whether those halls qualify as rooms in Kahn's sense is a question for another day.

(2) I'm conscious that Norberg-Schulz's idea of the center may be a Western one. Traditional Japanese architecture, which early modernists admired for its flowing, apparently centerless space, complicates the picture, though perhaps less than they believed. The Japanese house is organized around rooms measured in tatami, each with its own ceiling, which can be combined or separated with sliding screens as the season and occasion require. Formal rooms are often oriented toward the tokonoma, while traditional farmhouses gather around the hearth. Modernists borrowed the module and the sliding screen but often left the alcove behind. Perhaps the center that matters is less a geometric middle than a point of focus.