Created by Rintala Eggertsson Architects, Ark is a free-standing wooden tower accessed by a spiral case that connects two floors of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The façades of the tower consist of hundreds of shelves, holding thousands of books, which visitors can browse. The books can be read in private chambers within in the structure.
The tower is part of the ‘1:1 — Architects Build Small Spaces’ exhibition at the V&A, which runs until the end of this month. In this V&A video, the architects talk about their practice, the book tower and its installation:
I don’t think people will read more fiction than they have in the past… but something certainly is lost—the physicality of a book, how one makes a book one’s own by reading it (scribbling in it, dog-earing pages, spilling coffee on it) and living with it as an object… I can’t predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive—no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
Not Dead Yet — An interesting post at Personanondata on what the resilience of the CD format means for books:
Many believe the physical book will disappear within in the next ten years yet the example of the music CD suggests the future of the book may be more nuanced. The availability of electronic versions of trade content will approach 100% in less than ten years… Despite the availability however, electronic content is likely to represent only one of a number of ways consumers will engage with book content… Rather than disappear, the lowly print book may retain a position of wide distribution… and become the focal point of a facilitated interaction with numerous content acquisition options for consumers.
The lawmakers intended… to balance the incentive to create with the interest that society has in free access to knowledge and art… Over the past 50 years, however, that balance has shifted. Largely thanks to the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists, copyright’s scope and duration have vastly increased… They are now calling for even greater protection, and there have been efforts to introduce similar terms in Europe. Such arguments should be resisted: it is time to tip the balance back.
The campaign she created for “Catch-22” is now regarded as a classic. Ms. Bourne was the most passionate in-house champion of the book, a darkly comic tale of World War II by a first-time novelist. Pleading for an increase in the initial print run, she turned to her colleagues during a production meeting, tears in her eyes, and asked, “If I can’t get this, why am I here?”
I’m fairly certain that every architect and designer on the planet has seen Alex Roman’s artful short film The Third & The Seventh already. But I haven’t seen it mentioned on any book blogs as yet, and so for the benefit of other architecturally-inclined book nerds who may not have caught it, I thought I [...]
Created by Rintala Eggertsson Architects, Ark is a free-standing wooden tower accessed by a spiral case that connects two floors of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The façades of the tower consist of hundreds of shelves, holding thousands of books, which visitors can browse. The books can be read in private chambers within in the structure.
