Introduction

One of the most obvious places to start a discussion about the relationship between architecture and literature, buildings and books, is in the library. I have been lucky enough to visit and work in some of the best. “Intellectual workers, raise your productivity in the interests of building socialism,” said the banner that stretched across the palatial reading hall number one in Moscow’s Lenin library, where surrounded by sleeping octogenarian Party academics I ordered banned texts. With mental images of slaves and conquistadors I spent days in the gothic splendour of the Cabinet of Portuguese letters in Rio, the interior of which stepped skywards in rows of leather bound embossed mystery. On green mats illuminated by a brass lamp I began my excavations of Marxist history in the senate house library in London, a wonderful irony since it doubled as the Ministry of Truth in the remake of the film version of Orwell’s 1984. But there are two in particular that I would like to die in. One is Borges’ beautifully insane infinite library of Babel whose precise description of the matrix of hexagonal sections I have vainly tried to draw. The other is Boullee’s Biblioteque Nationale, a revolutionary declaration of the victory of science and Enlightenment philosophy, that in the perspective drawing looks like it could be a kilometre long rather than a modest one hundred and twenty metres. It is a building that Walter Benjamin might well have had in mind when he wrote:

Not that they (books) come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones before you, and now he is going to disappear inside it is only fitting. ¹