I woke up this morning thinking of the café in Gottesman Library at Teachers College. Don’t ask me, I can’t control these things.
It struck me that its use is despite itself.
Never mind that the most obvious door, flowing into the life of the college is locked, no doubt because the cafe bridges the security gates of the library. And never mind that those gates were loudly dysfunctional and have been disabled from early on, serving now only to complicate the flow of people.
And never mind that it is separated from the collaborative space of the library, adjacent instead to, well… first to the dead space of a vestigial stairwell and exit that no longer works, but then, eventually, to the standing terminals and circulation desk.
Never mind all of that. Architecture gets stuck sometimes. It is an unwieldy form. (Although to be sure, it would be simple to mitigate these things.)
No, what I woke up thinking about was the two TV’s, high up on the café’s wall, displaying the news. And then the blow-ups of the front pages of newspapers that adorn the walls. And maybe even the small book display and magazine rack.
It strikes me that they are not what they seem.
They seem to be there to pass on their information. Except that virtually nobody pays them any attention. (Although to be sure, I will often read a snippet of an article off the far wall while waiting in line for coffee. I am usually acutely aware of how this is my attention just seeking for distraction.) If you think of what people are actually doing in that space, you would be hard pressed to not come up with an image of people attending to their own needs: of food, caffeine, email and group plotting. Turned distinctly away from the TV’s and headlines.
So what are these things doing?
I suspect that they are the inverse of what they present themselves as. They present themselves as information that has been designed and presented for consumption. The layout and delivery is meant to facilitate the transfer of information. Design in the service of information.
Instead, what if they are information in the service of design? (And by design here, I mean in the diminutive sense, as the thing one does to an item to make it palatable and usable, not in the deeper sense advocated by Tim Brown, for example.) That is, the information itself is irrelevant. What is being displayed is the displaying of information. The café is presenting itself as the place in the college that serves as the interface to the outside world at the moment. Today’s breaking news.
It is only because its actual function is so different that this stands out as absurd. Amidst people finishing their homework, the headlines amount to decoration by signifiers.
Perhaps we can imagine it as an inadvertent version of Warhol’s soup cans. Indeed, while Warhol highlighted the essential multiplicity found in the design of a can of soup, the media itself has long considered its own proliferation. The wall of TV’s is a constant trope, as is the image of the newsroom in the background: the news portrays the proliferation of the news. We speak of embedded media, but media itself is embedded, picture in picture.
Centre Georges Pompidou
I think, finally, of the seminal Centre Pompidou in Paris, housing the Bibliothèque publique d’information, a public library, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne. Designed by Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, et al, it is nothing so much as a building turned inside out, displaying on the outside the duct-work and engineering of the functions of the building itself. The goal, in a sense was the same as the café’s: to mediate inside and outside. One jury praised the Pompidou for, “transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city.”
One can imagine that the façade of the Pompidou is turned not just inside out, but inward even further, so that it is the books themselves that serve as the bricks of this interior edifice, displayed as the emblem of information.
Chris, this is a really interesting observation about the appearance of information in the library cafe. I’m not sure I entirely agree that the “distraction” element is as insignificant as you imply, but I do agree that there is a lot of value in the signification around the “displaying of information” (at least, I think you are attributing a positive value to it, but I’m not quite sure if it’s the opposite — nicely done!).
The library does annual surveys of the student body (a sample thereof) to learn about everything from its resources to facilities, but over the years (six now since the opening of the cafe) we have not heard too much about the cafe space. It is, as you note, a pragmatically designed space, from the entryway to its adjacencies (and perhaps you can share your ideas to mitigate these circumstances). It’s not as wonderful as the Pompidou, but it has seemed to bridge the gap between a dusty book collection and the intellectual (re: caffeinated) and collaborative work of the community.
I wonder, finally, if there is a reasonable method (and, to be sure, a methodical reason) to enhance the soup-can-effect within the space… or, would enhancements run the risk of becoming kitsch? (Hey, if we aren’t there already — perhaps we are when, instead of news, there is a soap opera playing on one of the screens — by accident, of course.)
Hi Brian,
Thanks for response!
We are caught, as you indicate, between distraction and enhancement! Or maybe the enhancement of distraction. And everything hangs on interpretation…
In commenting on the displaying of information, I was trying to cleave closely to merely noticing and reflecting. I was studiously avoiding a positive or negative valuation. It remains a question. What are we doing when we present information in that light? If there is any judgment, it is that we have not reflected enough on this, imagining that we are doing something else.
We live in a time in which the art of the display of information proliferates, and this can lead to deeper understanding just as easily as it can lead to the illusion of deeper understanding, and the fetishization of designed information. There is no easy answer to this.
What I DID feel safe in pointing out is that the function of “information as design” in the cafe is at odds with the lived function of the space.
It is this discrepancy, if we catch it, which disrupts the too easy assumption that the function is actually informational.
To enhance it, without reflecting on the deep ambiguity of what it is for, leads us only deeper into an unreflective relationship to information. In that sense, it is not soap opera that we should fear as kitsch, but the news itself.
Indeed, driving it intentionally and reflectively further into kitsch, as I suspect it is already, might be one way to unearth the much more challenging ambiguities. (John Stewart, for example, attempts to walk a similar line.)
But that is a difficult aesthetic approach for an institution to take.
Much easier would be to back up, and rethink the function of display in the space in the first place. Can it match the lived function of the space better? This could be quite simply done.
Cheers,
Chris
Really? Don’t keep your best ideas a secret!
Hi Brian,
I’m being as forthcoming as possible. Honest! In this context what I can say is necessarily only at the level of function. So I have merely tried to point out the tension as specifically as possible and indicate a possible strategic direction.
At that next level, although there are plenty of directions to explore, it would require more specific understanding of dynamic factors. It would be misleading if I just threw around examples. Ideas that don’t actually emerge from the specificity of the situation are precisely the danger. Process will make or break an idea every time.
If you are really interested in making some changes, I’d be happy to dig into discussing the project and consult with the library on it. It would be fun. Just holler.
Chris
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