On this day
Los Angeles Built a Library Worth Looking Up From
Historical event:
Moving day involved roughly 300,000 books. That is one way to know your new workplace has a serious purpose.
In June 1926, the core collection of the Los Angeles Public Library moved into its new Central Library. The building opened to readers on July 6. The formal dedication followed on July 15, 1926. Those two dates describe different milestones: the moment the public could use the space and the occasion set aside to celebrate it.
The library’s official chronology supplies a striking picture of the original ambition. The new facility had thirteen public reading rooms, seating for 1,500 people, and capacity for 1,125,000 volumes. Architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue had died in 1924, shortly after the working plans were approved; his associate Carleton Monroe Winslow supervised completion of the final drawings.
Even before considering the building’s art, those facts make the project feel human. A permanent home for books had to become a functioning place for readers. The design was a promise. Opening the doors was the beginning of delivering on it.
Light was part of the idea
City Librarian Everett Perry wanted a different relationship between books and readers. The library’s architectural account explains his plan for a central information area, surrounded by stacks leading to subject reading rooms with natural light. The route through the building was meant to help people find their way from a question to the material they needed.
Light also became a theme in the decoration. Philosopher Hartley Burr Alexander developed an iconographic program around learning and illumination. Lee Lawrie’s large bronze chandelier placed a globe beneath signs of the zodiac, with forty-eight outer light bulbs representing the states of the time. Above it, a painted sunburst marked the dome’s center.
That is a delightfully ambitious thing for a light fixture to do. It illuminates a room while asking readers to imagine their place in a wider world. The library gave the practical act of finding a book a setting with ideas of its own.
A reading room works at several scales at once: the page close to your face, the table shared with another reader, and the architecture overhead. The pleasure is moving between them. You can come for one answer and find a whole building inviting your attention.
Let the everyday light tell you something
In your office, notice which ordinary surfaces the day's light brings into view. A glass partition may catch the morning sun; a reception counter may be most visible under the lights used for evening appointments. Bring those observations to the cleaning conversation instead of judging the room only at closing time.
Agree which accessible glass, ledges, and counters need attention, and leave artwork and lighting equipment to the people responsible for them. The aim is to care for the room people actually see and use.
JLV offers office cleaning in Orange County, Chino, and Ontario. Tell us where your workplace gets its moment in the light. Let's help the everyday details belong in the picture.