Small Public Libraries in America 1850-1890: the Invention and Evolution of a Building Type. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

With the exception of a few large and outst and ing monuments, the library buildings of America have received very little attention from architectural historians. This dissertation attempts to document the invention and evolution of a new nineteenth-century building type within the library genre: the small public library. It focuses specifically on buildings constructed between 1850 and 1890, which were intended to house fewer than 100,000 volumes, although the history of many related, earlier and larger contemporary structures is also recounted. Initial research into the area of library architecture revealed that over 400 public library buildings were erected in America before the turn of the century. Although the first of these were constructed in the 1850s, very few structures of this type were built outside of New Engl and , or even Massachusetts, before the 1880s. This dissertation then necessarily focuses heavily on this region and most especially on the precedent setting institutions of Massachusetts. These formed the basis for the development of library architecture in the rest of the country. This study of these buildings is concerned with questions of function, as well as the meanings and forms of these edifices, elements of the early public library program that were often thought to be incompatible. Because the symbolic meaning of these new cultural institutions was so strong, in fact, the architects' quest for iconographic form sometimes did tend to overshadow the librarians' concern for functional planning. This antithesis of intention was central to the dialectical evolution of the public library building during this period. It precipitated a series of intense debates between librarians and architects, which began around 1870 and culminated in the late 1880s, about the same time that the first identifiable public library building types were beginning to emerge. Ironically, the buildings of Henry Hobson Richardson, which have always been held in such high esteem by architectural historians, formed a central focus for these debates. The controversy that surrounded these, and other buildings, laid the foundation for the course of American library architecture well into the twentieth century.