The Power of the Plan
Consider the plan of the Edwin F. Conely Branch Library (figure 1), one of eight library branches built in Detroit’s working-class neighborhoods in the early twentieth century with funds provided by Andrew Carnegie.[1] At first glance, it seems unremarkable, as its symmetrical arrangement had been the conventional means of organizing public buildings in the West since at least the eighteenth century.[2] Sustained consideration, however, reveals much about the anticipated human interactions the structure was designed to facilitate. This is the power of the plan—exposing what we might call architecture’s social choreography.
Admittedly, plan-reading is not a skill that comes as naturally as, say, deciphering a period photograph. This may be especially true when the photographs include human figures with whom the viewer almost instinctively empathizes (figure 2). Hence, the frequency with which photographs are called into service as illustrations—that is, images affixed to a text after the argument has been developed in order to communicate the flavor of the events under consideration. Yet, if the objective is to use architecture as the foundation for a logical and compelling interpretation of the past—that is, as historical evidence in its own right—the plan often has as much, if not more, to offer. A close reading of architectural plans—even one as conventional as that of the Conely Branch Library—can enrich and even challenge historical interpretations developed on the basis of written sources alone.
Figure 1. Detroit Public Library, Edwin F. Conely Branch, Detroit, Michigan, designed by H.B. Clement, 1911-1913. First-floor plan. Courtesy Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.
The conceit behind a plan is that the building has been sliced through via a cut parallel to the ground—in the case of the Conely Branch plan, at the level of the windows—and the top part of the building removed. The viewer can then look down into the building. The cut edges have been filled in. (Called the poché, this shading is a graphic convention taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the nineteenth century to help convey the solidity of monumental stone walls. Perhaps because it highlights openings between rooms and thus makes highly legible the users’ options for circulating through architectural space, the practice has continued to be used and is employed to represent both solid masonry walls, such as those of the Conely Branch, as well as framed walls, which are largely hollow). Solid lines represent the intact surfaces of features below the level of the cut—in this case, exterior stairs, tables and chairs, a charging desk, and various plumbing fixtures. Dotted lines indicate what is overhead when the top part of the building is in place—in this case, either an arch or a flat beam supporting a section of wall above.
Figure 2. Detroit Public Library, Herbert Bowen Branch, Detroit, Michigan, designed by Stratton and Baldwin, 1910-1912. Children’s reading room during story hour, c. 1913. Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.
The Conely Branch plan presents a carefully considered entry sequence that calls attention to the building’s central axis, while inserting several transitional spaces between the sidewalk and the books—helping to heighten anticipation of the encounter with the books, while monumentalizing a building of modest proportions. The entrance is flanked on either side by exterior stairs that run parallel to the main façade. These two sets of stairs rise to meet at a landing, which leads first into a vestibule and then into a passage defined by the backs of low bookcases that face into the reading rooms on either side. Straight ahead is a charging desk, which provides library staff with a clear view of everyone entering the building as well as into its three major public spaces, labeled as children’s room, reference room, and reading room (although implicitly, of course, the reading room for adults). On one side of the reference room are the staff areas and stairs, which lead up and down to adjunct spaces, including a basement auditorium. On the other side is an alcove designated for story hour.
Figure 3. Davenport Public Library, Davenport, Iowa, designed by Calvin Kiessling, opened 1904. Basement and first-floor plans. Architectural Review 9 (January 1902) 25.
This plan says much about rapid and significant change in attitudes toward young readers in the early twentieth century. Notable here is the fact that the reading rooms for children and adults are essentially the same size. Given that even twenty years earlier, American public libraries provided no space whatsoever for children, this practice of devoting almost half the space of the library to the use of children highlights the extent of what was really a dramatic change.[3]
“A close reading of architectural plans . . . can enrich and even challenge historical interpretations developed on the basis of written sources alone. ”
Equally telling is the way that the arrangement of rooms makes the children’s reading room equivalent to the adult reading room. In some of the earliest libraries to serve children, the children’s room was situated to minimize disruption to the well-ordered calm of the areas used by adult readers. Sometimes it was located directly adjacent to the entrance to limit youngsters’ incursions into the building. In other instances, it was placed on another floor entirely. Offering the possibility of a completely separate entrance, a basement location was particularly effective for isolating juveniles, even as it conveyed the lesser status of young readers (figure 3). In contrast, at the Conely Branch both adults’ and children’s reading rooms share the same entry sequence, the same relationship to the charging desk, the same ceiling height, and the same treatment of bookshelves.
Figure 4. Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Mt. Washington Branch, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, designed by Alden and Harlow, 1899-1900. First-floor plan. Theodore W. Koch, A Book of Carnegie Libraries (White Plains, N.Y.: H. W. Wilson Co., 1917).
Significant as well are the rooms’ furnishings. The reading room for adults and the reference room have rectangular tables that seat eight, while the children’s reading room has circular tables that accommodate six. Not only do the younger patrons have more room, but their round tables also signal that they are not expected to display that same kind of bodily comportment as their elders, who are encouraged to align themselves on a regular grid. Again, this is a change from the first decade of the twentieth century, when children’s reading rooms were often identical is size and layout to reading rooms for adults, making it clear that at that earlier moment, children needed to deport themselves like adults in order to earn the right to use the library (figure 4). The design of Conely Branch acknowledges that even worthy children fidget.
“In this sense, child-saving worked in two directions: middle-class librarians set out to save working-class children, but the working-class children were likewise a key component in saving female librarians from the professional constraints in which they often found themselves working.”
Finally, the story-hour alcove speaks volumes about the deeply class-based assumptions behind this endeavor to bring public library services to children. Not only is it the smallest public space in the library, but also has the only fireplace in this centrally-heated building. That fireplace is flanked on either side by small, paired windows in an arrangement familiar from middle-class houses of the era and especially Arts and Crafts bungalows. The clean lines appealed to Americans who also embraced a wide range of aesthetic, social and sanitary reforms (figure 5). The story hour alcove is, the plan suggests, an attempt to bring the trappings of bourgeois domesticity into the library, providing a setting that would allow the middle-class librarian to play mother to the working-class children of the neighborhood.
Figure 5. Craftsman cottage, 1907. Living room. “Three Craftsman Cottages, Series of 1907: Number II,” The Craftsman 11, no 5 (February 1907), 609.
The space confirms the extent to which middle-class librarians defined their job—at least in part—as making up for the shortcomings of working-class homes. That part of the historical narrative is easily found in written sources, where Progressive-era reformers discussed their “child-saving” activities at length.[4] What is less clear from texts, but apparent from the built evidence, is the extent to which female librarians built an active professional role for themselves by building upon genteel notions of cultured mothering. The story-hour alcove allowed the female librarian to step away from the charging desk, where her labor was strictly technical in nature and constrained by equipment designed to bring her actions in line with practices codified by Melvil Dewey and librarianship’s other male leaders.[5] The story-hour alcove also allowed her to step into a space where her individual personal attributes—particularly her voice and gesture, the tools of the story hour—were valued as professional assets (see figure 2). In this sense, child-saving worked in two directions: middle-class librarians set out to save working-class children, but the working-class children were likewise a key component in saving female librarians from the professional constraints in which they often found themselves working.
Little of this was put into words. We have to look at buildings—and specifically at their plans—to see the library’s social choreography. In this case, the plan has the power to expose a rapid and substantial transformation in the treatment of youngsters in an important public institution and also to reveal the ways in which children and their needs were deployed to drive social change in the highly gendered context of the American public library.
NOTES
[1] Abigail A. Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890-1920 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 181-191.
[2] This mode of composition was formulated at the French Académie Royale d’Achitecture, established in 1671, and became a cornerstone of architectural design as taught in the nineteenth century at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. David Van Zanten, “Architectural Composition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from Charles Percier to Charles Garnier,” in The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, ed. Arthur Drexler (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 111-115.
[3] Manuel Lopez maintains that the first children’s reading room in an American public library was that opened in the basement of the Brookline, Massachusetts, Public Library in 1890. According to Harriet Long, a survey of 126 public libraries in 1893 revealed that over 70 percent maintained an age threshold of at least twelve. Manuel D. Lopez, “Children’s Libraries: Nineteen [sic] Century American Origins,” Journal of Library History 11, no. 4 (October 1976): 330; Harriet Long, “The Beginning of Public Library Service to Children,” in Reader in American Library History, ed. Michael Harris (Washington: NCR Microcard Editions, 1971), 223.
[4] A term widely used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “child-saving” described a wide range of reform activities, among them fighting child abuse; regulating child labor; providing libraries, kindergartens, playgrounds, and summer camps; establishing juvenile courts; and reduce infant morality rates. Caroline Hinkle McCamant, “Child Saving,” in Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, ed. Paula S. Fass (New York: Macmillan, 2004), 195-197. For an example of the period usage of the term, see Charles A. Murdock, "Child Saving," Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 13, no. 76 (April 1889): 395-401.
[5] Van Slyck, Free to All, 165-173.
