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Worpole, Ken. Contemporary Library Architecture: A Planning and Design Guide London: Routledge, 2013. 216 pp. ISBN 978-0-415-59230-7 (paperback), 978-0-415-59229-1 (hardback). £39.99, £105.00'A city with a great library is a great city.' This inscription above the door of the reading room of the Nashville Library provides the title of the opening chapter. According to Ken Worpole: 'No modern town or city is truly complete without a confident central library functioning as a meeting place and intellectual heart of civic life'. Libraries featured in this chapter (the only chapter in Part 1 of the book, 'The library in the city') include Seattle Public Library, the Library of Birmingham and Clapham Library in London.In the second part of the book - 'The libraryness of libraries' - Worpole traces the history of library architecture from the library at Alexandria through to the present day. This part comprises chapters entitled 'Libraries: the sacred spaces of modernity', 'What you see is what you get: key elements of library architecture' and 'A new wave of library architecture'.Part 3 - 'Planning and design processes' - gives practical advice. There's plenty on the nitty-gritty. Design points to be avoided include bad lighting, complex maintenance and insufficient work and storage space. Among the features to be encouraged are maximizing natural light and using zoning to accommodate a range of behaviours, separating silent from social spaces. There are various checklists, e.g. considerations to be taken into account when designing for good access, circulation and support amenities for those with disabilities. Worpole emphasizes the importance of adhering to the principles of environmental sustainability along with the need to consider the cost of maintenance over the life cycle of the building.Worpole warns of the pitfalls of overlooking library professionals in developing the design or working with the architect, and points to the benefits of collaboration. He reports that librarians have told him how they 'have been fascinated and greatly impressed by the design solutions which architects have proposed to what were thought to have been intractable problems'. Architects, in turn, 'have often been surprised to realise just how diverse the modern library offer is'.At the planning stage, Worpole points out that it is important to visit new libraries in other parts of the world. He notes that, without this wider perspective, 'people are often limited in their imagination to what they already know, and consultation simply becomes a form of asking how a new building might do the old things better rather than marking out entirely new territory'.Part 4 of the book provides selected case studies of some of the most distinctive library designs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. …
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