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Jul. 5th, 2010 12:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
42itous
The Seattle Public Library has a "books spiral." At the core of the building, a very gradual ramp goes around and around an escalator. Bookshelves and reading areas radiate off of the spiral. The floors of the building are designed to correspond to the Dewey Decimal system, so that as you traverse the fifth level you're passing the 500s, and the 600s are on the sixth level, and so on. Movable rubber squares tile the ramp, labeling the adjacent call numbers.
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Date: 2010-07-05 02:22 pm (UTC)And *that* was the real ingenuity of the design. One of the most challenging aspects of the two most-used classification systems is that they were designed for fairly static scopes of categories (e.g., they had to find a place to put computer books because there just wasn't a category for that). And, in the same way, the physical locations for these fixed categories were designed as fixed chunks of straight shelving.
To have a spiral where shifting to accomodate new categories of nonfiction as they appear is straightforward, is a brilliant bit of future-thinking in design.
I was last out in Seattle as they were finishing this library, and I haven't been in it yet. Need to fix that.