Reading Response

Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges

It’s curious that the story starts with the sentences, “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries,” because there were a students, including myself, who designed the “furniture” for the library based on a hexagonal pattern. It is later said that “The idealists argue that the hexagonal halls are a necessary form of absolute space, or at least, of our intuition of space.” When I started to base my design on the carrels and book stacks on a deformed form hexagon I found it to be an ideal space. Although the rectangular space is more common, it seemed to me that the hexagon allowed for a space that somehow enveloped the body instead of just cornering it in such a rectangular space does. The hexagon is also made up of six triangles, and triangles are thought to be the most stable of shapes.

There are a lot of cases in this story of small parts making up a bigger part. The whole of the library is built of repeated hexagonal galleries. “Five shelves correspond to each one of the walls of each hexagon; each shelf contains thirty-two books of a uniform format; each book is made up of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines; each line, of some eighty black letters.” Later on we find out that every book, although quite similar, are different from each other by a comma or letter. Similarly our assignment asks us to design carrels and book shelves that would be able to rearrange and reform the space and design of the library as a whole. Although our library would be composed of repeated forms, no two spaces or places for that matter would be the same or be experienced in the same way by two people.