Border Protection

U.S./Canadian border, Haskell Library, VT.  (photo via The Center for Land Use Interpretation.)

When claiming that libraries represent a defined realm within public space, we are actually reinforcing the notion that there is some border, however ambiguous it may be, between two worlds: the private and the public.  As access to public knowledge depends less on where you are and more on what type of communication technology you may be using, there is a good chance that the distinctions between the public and the private become less perceptible or less important.  That being said, it is unlikely that we will ever fully dispense with the (perhaps evolutionary) need to erect and maintain thresholds between physical public and private space.

An interesting example of how we are prone to express essentially imaginary lines in space is the public library in Derby Line, Vermont (if you are Canadian, you might prefer to call it the public library in Stanstead, Quebec).  The Haskell Public Library deliberately straddles the U.S./Canadian border.  Here, the cartographic image of “border” is rendered visible directly through the library, running uninterrupted between book carts and dusty periodicals.  This painted line embodies our need to maintain boundaries, even when the functional business of the immediate locale (in this case the library) would continue to operate with or without such overt partitioning.  It turns out that boundary-marking is a manifestation of psychological and cultural needs; it satisfies our need to know we are here while everything on the other side of the line is there.  There are, of course, some practical purposes of visible borders as pointed out by The Center for Land Use Interpretation:

“The line painted on the floor inside the library and opera house is more than just a novelty. Apparently it was required in order to show which portions of the structure and furnishings would be covered by the separate Canadian and American insurance policies.”

Insurance and other mundane issues aside, a library is an environment full of major and minor divisions between a whole range of public and private spaces.  If the modern library is virtually unbounded and thus prone to obscure traditional boundaries  within our public environments, should the architect try to maintain images of those fleeting boundaries through programmatic, graphic, or even more subtle strategies?  Maybe a bold, black line on the floor and walls is completely appropriate on our age of shifting informational and social boundaries.

See BLDGBLOG for a discussion of the Haskell Library in geo-political terms.