Building the Social Capital in the Public Libraries

This essay focuses on the process of evolution of contemporary public libraries, describing the changes that affected their role as “repositories of books” in the last decades. By comparison with the modern library architectural rigidity, as it resulted during the first half of the 20th century, contemporary designs progressively opened towards urban public spaces, becoming central in the notion of “third place”: places other than the home or the workplace, inclusive and sociable. During this period, the pivotal role of libraries in the enhancement of social capital became increasingly more important, shifting the efforts of designers from the functional implications of buildings devoted to the collection and retrieval of printed books and manuscripts, to a broader and less specialized series of functions, mainly orbiting around the idea of shared knowledge and cultural promotion and production. In this process, the library has become a public amenity, potentially nurturing communities and fostering human interaction, in which books are only one of the various means through which information is transmitted and communicated. These trends and changes are explained through the analysis of a series of contemporary library projects by which the aforementioned phenomena are explained. The article argues that designers are extremely sensitive to such changes, and contemporary projects show a great awareness of this trends, emphasizing the strategies adopted by the designers.