Now that a digital copy of the Library of Congress’s entire book collection could fit in a single shoebox, the future of the contemporary library is up for grabs. The New York Public Library’s proposed reconfiguration of its Manhattan headquarters is only the most recent high-visibility entrant in a debate that has been ongoing since the mid-1990s, manifested in the press and in a series of large urban central library projects in Berlin, Singapore, Seattle, and elsewhere. What should a contemporary library be? Seattle is one oft-cited exemplar: there Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture jettisoned the reading rooms, study carrels, and hushed whispers of the traditional library in favor of a dramatic multi-story “living room” where patrons could, according to the architects, “eat, yell, or play chess.” But to find architects, librarians, and municipalities who have re-conceptualized the contemporary public library with a more nuanced and promising vision, we must turn our attentions away from noisy Seattle and other large projects toward the modest community library.

Around the globe, a handful of innovative architects are forging a new building type with a deceptively familiar name. These libraries offer something found nowhere else in the contemporary city: heavily used, not-for-profit communal spaces that facilitate many and various kinds of informal social interactions and private uses. Ranging in size from five thousand square feet, a smallish McMansion in Westchester, to thirty thousand square feet, the size of Derek Jeter’s home near Tampa, some of these community libraries are neighborhood branches of an urban library system, and others stand alone. These buildings look nothing like one another, yet they all offer exemplary moments of architectural innovation. Collectively, they make the case that excellent design is no luxury, certainly not for the civic buildings and lives of people and their communities.





Community libraries have been around for centuries. Andrew Carnegie did not invent them, but recognized in them the means to socialize the cost of knowledge, building nearly 1,700 public libraries across the United States in twenty-eight years. Across the country, local philanthropists built countless others, recognizing that the community library was often the only place to which people had sustained and repeated access simply by virtue of their residence. Even today, to become officially recognized as a borrower at your local library, no more than a recent electric bill is needed—no passport, no green card, no social security number, no purchase necessary. To use the library to sit and read and rest, you need only to want to sit and read and rest.

Before the digital age, when local libraries were proud repositories for and symbols of humanity’s accumulated knowledge, the public goods that community libraries offered were books, and consequently their architectural arrangement was straightforward. Technically, they were typically loft-like spaces with strong floors. Functionally, they had a single point of entry (enabling staff to monitor the comings and goings of books and their users), stacks, reading tables, a prominently placed card catalog, and, ideally, natural light that fell on users and not on printed matter. Any number of architectural styles could convey the dignified solemnity befitting a civic icon. And so it went, generation after generation: libraries were built, and people knew that secreted within their walls a lifetime of glories awaited them in pictures and in words.

What differentiates today’s community library from its precedents—what makes it a wholly new building type in form and conception, albeit one with a deceptively familiar name—is the variety of public goods that it contains, and the variety of ways those goods are used by people as individuals and collectives. People today rely on their community library for so very many things! Books share space with DVDs, CDs, magazines, Internet-connected computers, lecture halls, classrooms, and more. The unemployed, under-employed, and self-employed frequent them. Immigrants attend English-as-a-second-language classes there. Homeless people park there. Caretakers and their young charges read, or just escape social isolation without paying for that right at the local mall. Working parents use them as free, safe depositories for untended offspring. Retirees get to the classics they have long deferred, work on their long-dreamed-of memoirs, dig into their family genealogies. Bootstrap community organizations stage art shows, concerts, performances, lectures.