“I declare that the Library is endless”
Borges, JorQe Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Coltected Fictions.
Trans. Andrew Hurley. NewYork: Penguin, 1998.
In our first seminar this week we were given ground plans of the entire library and were to write over them or own mapping of the building. We were asked to explore each floor and write onto our maps what we believe should be there instead of what is.
The Ground Floor:
We started with the ground floor. This and the third were by far the most interesting. The Ground Floor is like the hive in a nest or the control centre in a brain. Ironically we labeled the desk where the librarians worked ‘The Soul’ as they are the key to making the library work and without them the library become an empty shell. We labeled the small things that we had noticed that morning, for example the turnstiles were like ones in a football stadium and the big glass windows in the new extension became the observation deck, as that morning a group of us had recorded our initial thoughts and observations whilst sat there. The main thing that we thought about was how the Library didn’t have a basement and in the previous sessions we had categorised some imaginary books and decided that one category should belong in the basement. Therefore we created a basement and decided what would belong in The GCW Library’s basement.
The Third Floor:
We then moved onto the Third floor deciding to work our way back down the library. We renamed it ‘The Attic’ because on that floor the old warehouse beams are exposed and even though it is the lightest the sloping roof and wooden frames give it that Attic feel, as Pearson says, “The remains of the past are all around us. Architecture survives. “(2010, p.98) We liked the idea of the silent floor, even anyone who whispers gets daggers and especially two drama students wandering around for what would appear to the people doing work there, for no reason. So the silence inspired our labeling of this floor. For example, the wide space around the book shelves became a running track, the spacious tables became ‘the perfect socialising zone’ the long desks with the computers become the hurdles and the group room nearest the main entrance became the ‘open area for loud singing’. None of these labels fitted any there to do with the history and architecture that we thought about, we just wanted to turn the atmosphere of the floor on it’s head. And in the space between the invisible (external) stairs there had to be a ghost of the attic.
The Second Floor:
The second floor was difficult. It feels like the most visited of floor, it has computers lining the walls and the majority of the books and of course it has the drama section so it is the place to where we go to most, we even named the section on the floor plan ‘drama students only’. The main feature of this floor, as I have mentioned is the multitude of books. the shelves reach from floor to almost touching the ceiling and if you wander though them there are places where you can cut though to another section so we named it the maze. It almost felt like, to me, that there was so much information and knowledge on the shelves that it could be easy to get lost, if not physically but mentally. We named the ‘The Worth Room’, the external group room, ‘The Cube’, because in a previous lesson when we explored the outside of the library we found that there were no supports so it looks just looks like a big glass cube. As I’ve said previously we named the stairs ‘The Invisible Stairs’ as they are external and have glass surrounding them. For these reasons many people turn a blind eye and don’t notice them until they are actually looking. We found that this was the case with the library on a whole, by exploring the building thoroughly we saw things that one might not notice if just coming here to sit and write an essay.
The First Floor:
Even though the second floor was difficult the first floor was even harder to get to grips with. We felt it was the floor that almost got skipped. You hop in the lift and hit two as they have the computers to work on. However, the first floor has the most group room, nine in total, therefore even though sometime scarce of individuals it is quite a collective floor as people come together to work. It is also home to the Zibby Garnett Library which is dedicated to a woman who helped inspire the students of the University in her time to ‘strive for excellence’. We labelled the room ‘A Step Back in Time’ because when looking through the door, we couldn’t even get in, we saw a beautiful room that was a mix of the new, with computers and strangely, hand sanitiser, and the new, beautiful bound books, huge important books with covers.
I will continue to explore the library and i can imagine continue to discover things that I have never noticed before and in addition continue to imagine what could be in the place of something that is already there.