The Alexandria of the South?
A new book examines how the Nashville Public Library fits into recent history
by Christine Kreyling
The large, free municipal library is not a characteristically Southern institution. Both its agrarian nature and the general poverty after the Civil War limited the region’s ability to build centers of learning and culture. Books and magazines went to those who could afford to buy them. As late as the 1990s, Davis-Kidd Booksellers seemed to function as Nashville’s main book space more than did the public library downtown.
Thus it’s a measure of Nashville’s recent civic ambition that the city’s main library, opened in 2001, is a featured player in Shannon Mattern’s new study, Designing With Communities: The New Downtown Library (University of Minnesota Press, 240 pp., $39.95), which concentrates on libraries constructed since the early 1990s. In this useful short reference work, Mattern considers the design processes that produced the libraries, how the architectural form of each impacts function and embodies a community’s values and how the buildings fit into the historical context of the American public library.
Mattern describes three waves of library building in this country. Nashville has examples of each. The public libraries in East and North Nashville represent the building boom funded by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when city populations swelled with recent arrivals from farms and foreign shores, and the public library became a locus of acculturation. Classical architecture and reading rooms lined with bookshelves were intended to deliver direct access to the canon of Anglo enlightenment.
Nashville’s downtown Carnegie library was demolished in 1963 to make way for the Ben West library. This second-wave building reflects the modernist idiom dominant in commercial architecture; it offered flexible, modular plans with freestanding bookshelves amid tables and chairs. Popular materials—best sellers, newspapers and magazines—were showcased. Patrons were now consumers, and the library’s role was to deliver what customers wanted, not necessarily what librarians felt they should read. But planners came to realize, Mattern writes, “how inhospitable those monotonous, characterless…libraries really were.”
The new downtown library appeared during the third wave. Like the majority Mattern considers, Nashville’s library is the result of a design competition that produced a high-profile architect, Robert A.M. Stern. Civic leaders employed this strategy as part of a campaign to build excitement and funding support for an urban institution whose relevance an increasingly suburban population questioned. Also typical is its plan, with a popular materials “storefront” on the main level and research and special collections above.
The Nashville site also reflects a national trend to use a new library to rejuvenate an eroded area of downtown. In fact, the Urban Libraries Council—an Evanston, Ill.-based organization that promotes public libraries as a source of urban renewal—last week gave its 2007 Highsmith Award of Excellence to a group of part-time NPL employees called T.O.T.A.L. (Totally Outstanding Teen Advocates for the Library). The teen organization, based at the Main Library downtown, organizes poetry performances, workshops, contests and game nights to bring young adults to the library more often.
What makes Nashville’s library stand out from the ’90s crowd is its conservative, “looks like a library” architecture. “Nashville chose to build a new version of its old Carnegie,” Mattern writes. Unlike Brooklyn’s “crystal speedboat” or San Antonio’s big “red enchilada,” the Nashville library is a departure clothed as a revival of the city’s traditional self-identity as the Athens of the South.
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