The largest climatized reading space
snohetta.com
snohetta.com
Very close to BJ, the BinHai Library for example was pretty much empty when I was there last time, apart from people going in to take photos of the admittedly beautiful design. But when most of the upper shelves have fake books in them (I kid you not), it says a lot about how far China's dedication to reading goes. The average Chinese isn't interested in intellectual stuff currently, it's all about making money and reading is basically only for students to get good grades and strike well-paid jobs.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of cool modern architecture that imo doesn't get enough recognition. It's sadly rarely practical though, it's more built for prestige than anything else. The top down planning has a lot of advantages and there's certainly a lot of bold designs that architects couldn't get approved in any democratic place these days, where there are endless committees ultimately settling for the most plain and boring construction, the lowest common denominator. But these party officials also aren't really thinking about what the people need, what would make cities more livable. It reminds me a bit of Albert Speer's Germania vision. Certainly impressive and cool to look at, but maybe not a place you'd want to live long term.
"Say this about absolute monarchies: While living under them is awful (tens if not hundreds of thousands died building St. Petersburg, their bodies laid into the foundation), they do leave behind magnificent cities. Democracies, while far more pleasant, leave behind places like Phoenix."
-- https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/02/how-st-petersburg-c...
Slate sounds a bit like Harry Lyme in The Third Man contrasting Switzerland and Florence, anyway.
I mean I'm only seeing a few images actually showing books, and those are only three shelves tall. I'm also seeing high ceilings, literal hills made out of steps but without any apparent function other than maybe crowd photo ops, and some reading tables.
But the amount of books is about the same as a small local library or bookstore. What happened to the multi-storey repositories? Endless rows of categorised books? I don't get it.
The trend in modern libraries is for shorter shelves to improve accessibility. Not everyone is 2m tall or can climb steps and ladders.
And it must be acknowledged that physical books are less important than access to knowledge, facilities for study, and librarians to assist. All of those can exist in a comfortable, quiet space with a fast internet connection, a few printers, and lots of invisible but still valuable electronic databases freely available: ProQuest, JSTOR, PubMed, ERIC, etc.
Yes, it's comfy and familiar to those of use who grew up before the internet to wander among the dim stacks of dusty books and take in the aromas, but the real value of a library is the information in whatever form it takes.
I guess that explains why so many libraries are tossing old books, even local history books that have probably never been digitized and will be impossible to replace, while at the same time finding money to have larger computer rooms. Libraries are forgetting their purpose, giving people access to books and other documents should come before more vague missions like "access to knowledge" which gets twisted into meaning something other than books and documents.
Free internet access can be gotten all over the place. I can get online at McDonalds, but I can't get books at McDonalds.
My librarian friends spend most of their time playing with relational databases and showing patrons how to use computers.
And no, bookstores do not fit my vision of libraries. I specifically mentioned libraries hosting old local history books and other documents. Stuff that is long out of print, many times was never "in print" in the first place. In libraries that haven't suffered the purges as badly you can find things like binders filled with documents that a local history buff a century ago compiled, detailing town history a century before that. What bookstore has such a wealth of information? Once libraries get rid of that stuff, it's usually gone forever.
And yes, you can get free internet access, but those research databases I mentioned are not free to access. There a millions of "documents", to use your term, already indexed and categorized, with varying quality of searchability.
Let's not skip over the main point I meant to emphasize: librarians. I get why people in tech believe that they have all the tools and skills to do their own research. They don't value librarians for the expertise they have, even though just getting an entry level librarian job requires more education than most programming jobs.
A large open space with lots of hard materials though, I hope sound isn't an issue. The ceiling looks like it might be sound dampening though?
You won’t find cartoons by Zunzi anymore nor will you find back issues of Apple Daily. The entire political history of hong kong as recorded by published media has been sanitized to ensure that the overly sensitive overlords find nothing that might prick their ego.
So it doesn’t matter if the public library is a nice space with good architecture and a comfortable reading space. If only the official sanctioned viewpoints are available then it fails at the real objective of libraries: To allow people to enrich their mind by giving them multiple viewpoints so that they may forge their own opinions.
Having a public reading space is always nice
For example trying to write a balanced biography of the military leader that got us (Romania) into WW2 [1] alongside the Germans has become next to impossible, you'd risk breaking several anti-genocide laws. That was not the case before our accession into the NATO and EU ideological structures (the mid-2000s).
What's funny is that the one biography of Antonescu [2] that is not entirely about how "he was a very bad genocidaire" has been written by a person of Jewish ethnicity at a very small printing house (almost self-published), I guess the powers that be thought that it would have looked bad were they to go after a Jewish person who had tried to be impartial to Antonescu.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu
[2] https://www.libris.ro/maresalul-ion-antonescu-o-biografie-te...
> Several cities and towns still named streets after Ion Antonescu, the Romanian dictator from the Second World War, and some local authorities refused to change the name despite requests from the Wiesel Institute. After the Wiesel Institute repeatedly requested, in February, Constanța City Hall to change the name of Ion Antonescu Street, Constanța Mayor Vergil Chițac stated in the press that the evaluations of Antonescu's activity are controversial and contradictory and the City Hall will consider renaming the street after members of academia review the topic
(via google translate)
Hope that that clears up the "vague" thing.
[1] https://ro.usembassy.gov/ro/romania-raportul-international-p...
Because there's more to a name than it's namesake. People attach memories and stories and feeling to names. And being told that this all needs to be updated because of bad things in the past by people that don't even live near you will always seem obnoxious.
This makes it sound like I'm against renaming anything, and I'm not. But I don't find it at all surprising when people push back against renaming things or removing monuments due to a reassessment of the past via a modern critical view.
One the other hand I feel like there are some important differences. The Holocaust is still a recent and deep wound in the European psyche, and Antonescu was an enthusiastic and vicious perpetrator of it in Romania. Romania was the only Nazi ally that independently instigated the Holocaust within its borders. Hitler even praised Antonescu for putting in place much more radical policies for eliminating Jews. Anti-semitic policies continued well beyond the end of WW2 - while Germany invested in reparations and remembrance and rebuilding itself as a safe place for Jews to live, Romania was still outlawing Jewish organisations and bargaining with Israel to allow Jewish emigration for cash. There is still a small Jewish community in Romania, but from what I've read they have good reason to feel uncomfortable about expressing their beliefs openly.
The link that paganel provided is a report from the US embassy, advising US government and citizens on the status of religious freedom in Romania. Whilst it does reference specific city halls, it only does so via references to statements from the Wiesel Institute, a public institude established by the Romanian government to study the Holocaust in Romania. As far as I can tell, it's saying "the country's own national institutes having pointed out transgressions of its own constitution regarding religious freedom". This is presumably of interest for people considering tourism, business or diplomatic work in the country.
> Holt employees sent the Bureau all manner of literary foreknowledge, from book proposals to page proofs to advance copies—so much material that an editorial staffer wrote Hoover with the news that “I am beginning to feel like a member of the FBI myself.”
> Predictably, Hoover and his ghostwriters were asked to provide blurbs for The Hidden Russia and other anticommunist titles. Just as often, however, the Bureau was granted uncommon rights of pre-refusal. Holt editor Milt Hill, for example, asked FBI contacts for “advice as to whether we should do or not” a McCarthy autobiography, receiving a green light since it “would be a friendly book from a Bureau standpoint.”
> Books less kind to the Bureau were rejected with its help at Holt and other firms. The manuscript of Fred Cook’s muckraking The FBI Nobody Knows, eventually published in 1964, was refused at Random House (home of The FBI Story) after publisher Bennett Cerf shredded professional ethics by forwarding a copy to Hoover.
> Editorial informants such as Cerf, recruited in the wake of the Lowenthal embarrassment, made it practically impossible to criticize the FBI through a major New York publisher without costly delay. With the FBI fed the minutes of editorial board meetings at Time and Life, Fortune and Look, the Reader’s Digest and the Daily Worker, points along the full spectrum of U.S. print culture were opened to Bureau pre-awareness. To adapt Louis Nichols, there was now most always a body poised to throw itself between the presses.
https://theamericanreader.com/total-literary-awareness-how-t...
Of course that all stopped after the 70s/80s, right?
Try to get through Chinese immigration wearing a T-shirt that says "Tienanmen Square 1989" or "Free Tibet" and I'll bet you will find that they care quite a lot.
If after November, the powers that be decide that "Donald Trump lost the 2020 election" is no longer allowed speech, you're screwed. Especially if you wear it on a T-shirt.
Are you talking about this kind of thing? https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Depends how you "use" it, surely. Using it to claim that black people are inherently more violent, or to justify police crackdowns on black neighbourhoods is still racist and is not supported by the fact in itself.
It's almost certain that there are other things like this going on right now. We just haven't heard about them yet. In other words, within our lifetimes we will almost certainly learn, "In 2024, they did..." and we're not aware of it now.
> if a young actress had accused him in 2010, for example, she would have been suppressed
She probably would have worsened her career prospects, which I agree is horrific. It's a testament of how the entertainment industry reinforces patriarchal norms. But it is a far cry from actual suppression. Personalities like David Icke have been lobbing accusations around about the Royal Family for years, publishing books and giving talks. As far as I'm aware he hasn't been imprisioned or censored in the UK for any of that. He's been banned from countries for denying the Holocaust and spreading COVID misinformation, but neither of these are cases of stating well-established facts.
As the common wisdom goes: Al Capone was not arrested for being a crime boss but for tax evasion. Why bother setting clear boundaries on what behavior is or isn't anti-revolutionary if you can just make sure everyone already violates the law based on technicalities and then just decide who you want to arrest for it as necessary?
If anything "spy on your neighbor" plays into what I said: you not only need to worry about getting on the bad side of the authority (i.e. those able to enforce the law against you) but of literally anyone else who might have it out for you. The legal basis for arresting people is just legalistic window dressing to create a pretense of law and justice.
This is, by the way, the biggest practical distinction between the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: in peak Nazi Germany the police would just drag you off the street and throw you in a hole or shoot you for treason, in the Soviet Union the police would disappear you into a gulag but only after giving you an unwinnable mock trial where you would be put on record to confess (after torture if necessary or desired) to your treasonous counter-revolutionary beliefs. Because one followed purely from "might makes right" and the other tried to maintain a pretense of ideological principles and justice. Not that this mattered much to those on the receiving end - you'd still end up dead or imprisoned.
Beautiful space. I'm sure it's a great place to spend some time.
Are you referring to the inappropriate sexual books pandered to little children in schools?
That's correct. In the US, we have the First Amendment to prevent government interference, and the genesis of that law goes back to John Milton's Areopagitica.
On the flip side, that same document gives private business broad economic freedom, and businesses are not afraid to use their economic power to suppress or bury ideas that threaten their profits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_govern...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_censorship_in_the_United_...
Another was banned 100 years before the US was founded.
More recently: one book was banned for containing classified information, another for seducing people to commit tax fraud (the author's followers having already committed $56MM in tax fraud. I agree with both of these restrictions.
A more interesting one was Nixon trying to suspend the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, but a court opposed it.
I don't see any actual book banning or burning.
I think freedom means that we get to decide for ourselves what is "immoral" or "lewd" and can choose to read or not read those books accordingly. I'm guessing you've never read "Forever Amber" or "Naked Lunch" or even "Howl", but you might just be surprised at what your would-be masters decided was too explicit for you to be allowed to read.
> I don't see any actual book banning or burning.
You must have missed the parts where books were banned by states and even where in the 60s the federal government forced a publisher to pull all copies of a book from the shelves of bookstores and to stop publication of it entirely just to appease a foreign country that was embarrassed by the truths the book exposed about them.
People who leak classified material can be prosecuted, if discovered, but the press is not bound by classification directives in the United States. It was established in this 1971 court case around the classified Pentagon Papers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_S...
Funny that.
I sometimes wonder, as I did with Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Central Library design, whether architects spend a lot of time actually using or working in libraries. I guess the brief isn't "make the best library for patrons" but "make a library which can symbolize the glory of our city and its wealth".
https://franklloydwright.org/frank-lloyd-wrights-larkin-and-...
Merriam-Webster says that "climatized" means "acclimated" so I don't think it makes sense as used here.
It was always hot and humid in there, probably due to the manufacturing process itself, but not uniformly so. Certain spots would be extra humid, which would cause water vapor to rise up to the ceiling. There were enough particulates in the air for it to then condense into droplets that looked like clouds, which would then create a very light drizzle 20-50 feet away.
I fucking hated that place.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Central_Library_Oodi
In other countries, you can just read outside on a real hill, under real trees, in the light of the real sun, breathing in non-polluted air.
I will take the New York Public Library, which has a good reading room with lots of tables, and a very good collection.