"New Beauties": The Design of British Public Library Buildings in the 1960s

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/31860

Title: "New Beauties": The Design of British Public Library Buildings in the 1960s
Author(s): Black, Alistair
Issue Date: 2011
Keyword(s): Library design
Abstract: In 1960 the architectural correspondent of London’s Times newspaper praised contemporary architects for having evolved what he called “new beauties”: attractive, modernist buildings created out of new techniques and approaches to style and structure. This study features a particular set of these “new beauties”: public library buildings of the 1960s, both large and small. In the 1960s, public library design finally broke free from its Victorian heritage. The new library buildings that appeared in this decade, clothed as they were in the architectural modernism of the time, reflected an age of optimism and intended modernization, when faith in the postwar welfare state was at its height, when hopes for technological and economic renewal were running high, and when the outlook of professional librarians was becoming increasingly progressive.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
ISSN: 0024-2594
Type of Resource: text
Language: en
Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/31860
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2011.0033
Copyright and License Information: Copyright 2011 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Library Trends 60 (1) Summer 2011: Library Design: From Past to Present. Edited by Alistair Black and Nan Dahlkild