Architecture and central public libraries in America, 1887--1925: A study of conflicting institutions and mediated designs (Massachusetts, New York, Ohio)

The principal aim of the dissertation is to explain architecture and the public library as institutions equally involved in the making of central library buildings in America in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An investigation is carried out first into the situation of architecture and the library, including the historical contexts of their production. Second, three central library buildings—those in Boston (1888–1895) by McKim, Mead, and White, in New York (1897–1911) by Carrere and Hastings, and in Cleveland (1916–1925) by Walker and Weeks, are studied as primary examples. The three buildings are representative of issues of the formal and functional organization in library architecture; indeed, apart from their significance as urban artifacts, their characters and their organization and changes therein reflected the thrust of contemporary discourses in architecture and among librarians. The dissertation thus considers the thesis that American central library buildings were charged with layers of meanings that arose in part from the intersections and interstices between the conceptions of value and the nature of the institutions. It provides fertile ground for the exploration of architecture and for a consideration of its occasionally uneasy relationship with the perceived and real functions of cultural institutions such as libraries. It permits an introspective look at disciplines and institutions that felt the need to maintain their identities while crossing boundaries in the production of their buildings. Further, it deepens our understanding of architecture and its practices in a period of historical transformations. The period is considered particularly important, both, because the public library as a modern institution and architecture as a profession were consolidating themselves at the time, and because the cities where these buildings are located were themselves undergoing major social, cultural, political, and physical changes.