心地とインターフェース

On a visit to Melbourne a little while ago, I stopped by State Library Victoria. Opened in 1856, it is Australia’s oldest public library. From the beginning, it was conceived as “The people’s university,” a place where anyone could learn. It is also known as one of the most beautiful libraries in the world.

One of its best-known spaces is the La Trobe Reading Room, a large octagonal room that opened in 1913. Six storeys high, it has desks radiating out from the centre, with bookshelves around them. Apparently, it can hold up to 32,000 books.

Looking down from an upper floor, I could see many people sitting at desks beneath the white dome. There were books around them, and above them too. I had seen photographs, but standing there, it felt less like a place for reading books and more like a landscape made of them.

I do not read all that many books. But I like reading. I find books that interest me and read them a little at a time, and I also enjoy browsing the shelves in bookshops and libraries.

Early in my career, I worked at a small publishing company then based in Koenji, Tokyo. It published many books about everyday life: cooking, neighbourhood walks, cats, music. I was not an editor; my role was to build websites for its online media and shop. Still, I got to watch the editorial team making books up close, day after day.

Writing and photographs gathered through interviews and research were selected, put in order, and gradually shaped into a book. Even then, I found it fascinating to see bits of knowledge and pleasure scattered through everyday life brought together in the form of a single book.

Over this long weekend, I visited the Kadokawa Culture Museum.

The first thing that catches your eye is the building itself, before any bookshelves. It is a huge polyhedron whose architectural design was overseen by Kengo Kuma, with roughly 20,000 slabs of granite, each 70 mm thick, covering its exterior. Kengo Kuma and Associates describes it as though the Musashino Plateau had risen up to form the building.

Seeing it in person, I felt a powerful energy. Knowing how many books and exhibits it held inside, I wondered whether gathering this much knowledge in one place called for a vessel this heavy.

On the fourth floor is “Edit Town,” a space built around books. Running through its centre, Book Street holds about 25,000 books along a stretch of 50 metres.

What interested me was how they were arranged. Rather than following conventional library classifications, the books are organised around “nine contexts for reading the world,” under the direction of Seigo Matsuoka, an editorial engineering scholar and the museum’s first director. The categories include “Into the Forest of Memory,” “Difficult Books,” “Brain, Mind, and Media,” and “Work and Everyday Life.”

On its page about the project, Hyakken, the company behind Book Street, describes Matsuoka’s concern about leaving the “order of knowledge” that books have sustained to the internet. How do we classify books, and what do we place beside them? Their arrangement contains a way of looking at the world.

The Kadokawa Culture Museum describes this as a shift “from a library for searching to a library for encounters.” When I pick up a book that interests me, the spine beside it catches my attention too. I notice an unfamiliar name. I do not know what a book is about, but its cover draws me to pick it up. The arrangement of the books seems to shape the experience before I even begin reading.

A single book is a small interface into which information has been condensed. When several books sit side by side, relationships emerge between them that could not exist in one book alone. And when thousands, or tens of thousands, gather together, books begin to do more than convey information. They begin to create a space.

At State Library Victoria and the Kadokawa Culture Museum, people read, write, and think within these spaces.

Even when a search returns a million results, it is difficult to physically sense how much a million is. But walking between bookshelves, I find that they keep going. There are books in places I can only see by looking up.

Before I understand it in my head, I feel it in my body: there is still this much I do not know. A single book is something I read for its contents. Gather tens of thousands together, and they also become a way to feel the extent of what I do not know.

A book, a bookshelf, and then a space. Even with the same information, a change in scale changes what it means as an interface. These were the thoughts I found myself having, surrounded by books.