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ABSTRACT
The evolution of modern libraries has been closely related to the development of modernity in Western societies, both in relation to the development of social life in the last centuries and to the growing importance of reading, information, and knowledge and to the ideas of enlightenment, democracy, tolerance, and the open society. The increasing number of library buildings and the development of library space are part of the greater accessibility of information, the opening of the organization of knowledge, and the creation of a public sphere. This article examines the making of the modern library building and the related discourse by selecting important model buildings, guidelines, discussions, and experiments reflecting various cultural and social visions of democracy and openness. The perspective is international. An investigation is made of the physical as well as the social construction of the modern library space and of its identity and "libraryness."
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The development of modern libraries has been closely related to the development of modernity in Western societies, both in relation to the development of social life in the last centuries and to the growing importance of reading, information, and knowledge and to the ideas of enlightenment, democracy, tolerance, and the open society. The increasing number of library buildings and the development of library space are part of the greater accessibility of information, the opening of the organization of knowledge, and the creation of a public sphere.
The aim of this article is to examine the making of the modern library building and the related discourse by selecting important model build ings, guidelines, discussions, and experiments reflecting various cultural and social visions of democracy and openness. The perspective will be international. The article will investigate the physical as well as the social construction of the modern library space and of its identity; and of, what Greenhalgh, Landry and Worpole (1995) have termed, its "libraryness." Some of the examples offered below have been more important for the actual building process than others. Some are existing buildings, some are practical building guidelines, others are exhibition models, utopian projects, or avant-garde experiments, but together they constitute various ideal types of the modern library building, which reached its peak in the twentieth century. Around the millennium, the idea...