73/100: The Library Goes AirSpace
This vignette is one in a series of 100 about the libraries in New York City. To read from the beginning, click here.
Kyle Chayka, a writer whom I both love and hate (but only because he says so many of the same things that I’m thinking but so much better), coined the term “AirSpace” nearly a decade ago. In a 2016 essay for Verge, a US based tech website, he explained how the hipster aesthetic — the instagramable quasi-rustic, industrial chic, avocado toast-y kinda look — had taken over the world. Go to a coffee shop in Berlin or Bangkok, the piece goes, and the effect is the same: a “faux-Scanadanavian minimalism” with a “superficial sense of history”. You could travel around the world, and find the same space no matter how far you traveled.
Eight years later and the trend has only metastasized; from cafés and restaurants to gyms, offices and homes, AirSpace is everywhere. Including, I’ve just realized, libraries.
I have, through the course of this series, thus far visited six libraries in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Of those six, four have undergone renovations in the last ten years. Of those four, three look remarkably the same. The Jefferson Market did that funky retro signatures wallpaper, but the rest — Central BPL (well some parts anyway), Stavros Niarchos, and this week’s Brooklyn Heights Library — could all be part of the same building. And as it were, that building is a sleek, open concept room with a stark wood motif (beech or birch or ash or something like that), Helvetica equivalent signage, and sparse furnishings.
Aesthetic trends are nothing new; in earlier days, all libraries looked the same too, only instead of reclaimed birch wood and natural light you’d have African mohogany and stained glass, because those were the preferences of the day. The Beaux-Arts or Gothic libraries are in many ways more elegant, but also opulent, unethical, and inefficient in every way.
It definitely makes sense to streamline materials and space and all those things, but it is odd that we’ve all agreed there’s a singular way to do this. It all feels a little Brave New World when everything starts to look the same.
Today’s conventional wisdom mandates that a cluttered space gives way to a cluttered mind. Somehow this has gone from keeping a space tidy to nearly emptying it completely, save for some modular gray accents and a plant or two.
I actually quite like the minimalist aesthetic — it’s calming. I mean there’s also little to criticize because there is little to begin with, but I digress, as my cluttered mind is wont to do.
My issue with the clutter mantra is that it takes clutter as something that needs to be gotten rid of rather than straightened out. My clutter tells the story of my character, and that’s true for everyone. Our stuff reflects our pasts — travels, tastes, relationships, moments captured in time. It needs to be sorted through, constantly, and ideally catalogued into a neat little system of divisions and subdivisions, perhaps markated by a combination of number sequences to uniquely identify each item.
They say, when you’re trying to learn how to meditate, that it’s not a question of emptying your mind, but rather of simply noticing which thoughts come and go within your mind. It’s a push and pull affair: you allow each thought to have its moment, whether it’s a good thought or a bad thought or a nothing thought, before letting it pass and returning to the breath. You notice, for instance, that you started writing a piece on the Brooklyn Heights Library decor and it’s now morphed into a tangent on how the new minimalism gets it wrong.
And that’s okay, return to the breath, return to the AirSpace.
Thanks for reading!
