Machines for reading in

In his post Bibbly-O-Tek, on his splendid blog, Nasty Brutalist and Short, sometimes known as Sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, Owen Hatherley discusses library architecture, including Senate House and the British Library, in a way that I wish one could read in the voluminous discussions on library planning and design in our professional literature. That literature makes a virtue of philistinism, our tendency to dismiss aesthetic theory and concentrate instead on floors' load-bearing capacity. Many of us though will recognise his characterisation of building a new library as including 'lengthy gestation, controversy, changes in design, and most of all squabbles over money'.In thirty years of library work, I have rarely been lucky enough to work in interesting buildings. The public libraries of my early career seemed to have been designed to a universal template, whose guiding principle was to be as inoffensive as possible.NHS libraries were generally dire, though my predecessor at Edgware General Hospital was immensely proud of the hand-basin in her office, apparently been included in the design at her express request.
The honourable exception to all this is Basil Spence's library at the University of Sussex, where I worked, though not for long enough.