Abstract
In recent decades libraries have been challenged in many ways, perhaps most pointedly by the digital revolution. This is, however, not the first time – a series of booms in library architecture emerging rather when knowledge ideals are challenged than established allows us to discuss library architecture more clearly as investigations into what knowledge, learning and literature could be rather than as expressions of what knowledge, learning and literature is. These questions are complex and multifaceted and require both careful examination of architectural proposals and works and a step back to analyse the propositions they make through their formulations into architectural form. Utilizing four public library extensions in Sweden, of which three have been built and one has been rebooted, and competition and parallel commission proposals for their making, this article discusses how ideas of libraries, knowledge, and literature emerge through the mediation of programme, collections, activity, and visitors in interaction, related to other aspects of architectural form. Building on a series of empirical findings of correspondences between use patterns of libraries and spatial configuration, the article takes this discussion further into what this means for a discussion of architectural principles, ideals, and propositions.
