Temples of Books

The Library Essay

The Library Keeps Being Rebuilt

Every age that could afford to has built rooms for its books, and this survey from the Berlin publisher gestalten, written with Marianne Julia Strauss and published in 2022, takes the long view of the habit, from monastery halls and princely courts to the new civic libraries rising across Asia and Scandinavia. The photographs give the historic interiors their due, but the book's quiet argument is contemporary: the library did not end with the internet, it simply changed shape.

The modern buildings collected here are busier than their ancestors, part reading room, part commons, and architects treat them as signature commissions again. Set beside the gilded halls of earlier centuries, they suggest a continuity of intent, that a society announces what it values by what it shelves.