Post by RusskyHoya on Jul 11, 2024 7:58:27 GMT -5
The plan would slice corridors through the building like a birthday cake, preserving its function as a library, with design guided by Jesuit principles of social justice, simple living, spirituality and community.
From the mid-1950s onwards, college libraries evolved into what would now approximate a public library, with circulation privileges, a constant influx of obscure periodicals, and more open study locations, though that discipline has changed from a solitary pursuit to a much more communal activity. But as the Internet has laid waste to print materials and more and more books are stored off-site than on site (i.e., Lauinger is now too small), the long term planning is not going away, even if library science professionals are notoriously slow to change.
In 2009, Princeton set about renovating its library. It took ten years.
www.princeton.edu/news/2019/03/11/new-era-begins-princeton-university-library
There is a huge amount of thinking and writing that has been taking place ever since the Internet became A Thing about what the futures (plural intentional) of libraries might look like.
One can see some examples of that, albeit in a non-university setting, in the renovation of the MLK Library that was so derided upthread. The renewed facility that opened in 2020 features "new fabrication spaces include sewing machines and a tool-rental library"
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/americas-libraries-are-essential-now--and-this-beautifully-renovated-one-in-washington-gives-us-hope/2020/07/15/d7b0bbc6-c5ed-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html)
Having the world at your fingertips allows you to largely ignore libraries, whether individually or organizationally, and it's clear from the continued pushing back of the Lauinger renovation/expansion that Georgetown has chosen this to be an area of investment where it mostly kicks the can down the road.
It's a premier space on a highly space-constrained campus, though, so something is going to have to be done eventually, though the exact timing seems as unclear as that of the 'Yates castle maneuver.' It would make sense for it to be the facility centerpiece of the next capital campaign, but the lack of public engagement on that account suggests perhaps not.
What has received some out-in-the-open collaborative visioning is the South of Regents interdisciplinary building, which has long been envisioned as a flex space. One of the things such a flex space would let you do is take most or all of Lauinger offline for an extended renovation period...just a thought.