2019. 10. 26 토
What interests and excites me is not a corporeal library, but a library in a story. If I recall a few of my experiences in different libraries, uneventful and rather stifling, I see myself always somewhat detached and unable to feel any affection for the books, unimpressively present there rows after rows, like a series of dusted Vaudeville backdrops. How can I erase this feeling of anonymity? Would I have felt more in place, had I brought my own book to read in the space? I did read my own copy of A Room of One’s Own in the Bavarian State Library the time I visited, but it was one of those very rare occasion, where even Woolf could not be a saviour.
When I imagine a library, its infinite number of shelves and its infinite number of books, or maybe its single book with an infinite number of pages, only then do I truly and finally understand what library is. Its rooms are intimate and its lights gentle and soothing, its labyrinthian passageways unending and forever paved with marbles, its reddish dark wooden shelves polished and sophisticated and ladders of which metalworks are delicate and timeless. I am comfortable and I am alone. Soon I understand that the glory of such place as library lies not in the listed superlatives, but in the fact that I, as an architect, dream and dream of it. It is plausible to believe that true libraries can only be built in minds.
The discrepancy has never disappointed me, although I have to admit that it has, ever since my first encounter with the supposedly-Divine and the supposedly-Uncomprehensible, despirited my soul a few times. I have learned to see it as a challenge, a challenge of an architect. How do we elaborate the presence of books? Of literature and minds? How do we lay down the path so that we may, without disarray, enter the realm of thin pages and cyphers? Or is disarray called for? Even inevitably?
Borges wrote his kafkian story of the Library of Babel from his memories working in the Miguel Cané branch of the Municipal Library in Buenos Aires. To my understanding, it(the story and the library both) later became a sole book, the Book of Sand, which has neither beginning nor end. This was one form of labyrinth to Borges, as endless sand is in its own way inescapable.
