Etagère Pour Livres by Philippe Nigro

Etagère pour livres, Philippe Nigro, 2005 (France).
[VIA catalogue, p. 25]

I saw this wonderful bookshelf on the Bookshelf blog (where else?). I love it not only for its beautiful and interesting design but also because it reminds me of the "Books Spiral" at the Seattle Public Library. The Books Spiral is four connected levels of gently sloping floors holding the nonfiction collection in one continuous band. This allows for the easy rearrangement of books and prevents categories from being broken up on to different floors. Here are a couple of views:

Lately I've been watching Alain de Botton's series, The Perfect Home, which is based on his book, The Architecture of Happiness. Though I was excited by modern architecture and design before, I am even more enthusiastic about it now. Where I live (and it's probably the same where you live), people seem addicted to what de Botton calls "pastiche" architecture, that is, trying to make homes look like something from the past. Fake brick, fake stone, fake window panes, fake pillars—people don't seem to care that their homes are pretending to be something they're not. What does that say about us? People like their modern-looking cars and computers, and IKEA is doing booming business, but when it comes to house design, people retreat into historical clichés as though they were undergoing past life regression. What de Botton shows in his series (and no doubt in his book as well) is that modern architecture seems to bring people out of themselves. Modern homes expand the people who live in them. I wonder if the same is true of libraries?

Comments

[Rob]

These sloping book cases make me worry for the books at the bottom of the slope—isn't there a chance of them getting slightly crushed, and winding up in that strange shape where the spine is a few mm thicker than the rest of the book? Or am I the only person who notices / worries about these things?

[Sylvia]

Yes, I suppose the downslope books would get squished. There's always a price to pay for beauty!

[Rob]

How true, how true. *Sigh*