environmental considerations and anything else that influences the quality of library service. Toward the close of his penetrating study of the place concept, psychologist David Canter states that ‘‘If the reader is looking for a key to unlock the practical, day-to-day implications of the research with which I have been dealing, then I would suggest the slogan: The Goal of Environmental Design is the Creation of Places’’ (Canter, 1977, p. 157). If spaces can be designed for political and commercial purposes, surely they can be designed specifically for purposes of the library. Because the library is a place with a latent essence that is rich in potential for experience, there may not be a right way or wrong way to accomplish this. But there may be better ways of strengthening, emphasizing, and drawing upon the potential.
However subtle and complex they may be, concepts of place have an es- sential function in making the library successful in its community.
possible to appreciate the visual qualities of a place with one short visit, but not how it smells on a frosty morningyTo know a place is also to know the pastyIf it takes time to know a place, the passage of time itself does not guarantee a sense of place. If experience takes time, passage of time itself does not ensure experi- ence’’ (Tuan, 1975, p. 164). A neurologist confirms that ‘‘The perceptual experi- ence has a past and a future reference; it is selective, directive, and purpose-like, though most of these processes go on below the level of awareness’’ (Herrick, 1956, p. 349).
7. Another description of the process, a bit more detailed, is that cited by David Canter, a psychologist, who finds a statement published in 1920 by the neurologist Henry Head to contain ‘‘the seeds of almost every major development in the psychology of place’’(Canter, 1977, p. 16). Head wrote that ‘‘the sensory cortex is also the storehouse of past impressions. These may rise into consciousness as images, but more often, as in the case of spacial impressions, remain outside central consciousness. Here, they form organised models of ourselves, which may be termed ‘schemata.’ Such schemata modify the impressions produced by incoming sensory impulses in such a way that the final sensations of position, or of locality, rise into consciousness charged with a relation to something that has happened before. Destruction of such ‘schemata’ by a lesion of the cortex renders impossible all recognition of posture or of the locality of a stimulated spot in the affected part of the body’’ (Head, 1920, pp. 607–608). Employing terms less technical, art psy- chologist Rudolf Arnheim writes that ‘‘My contention is that the cognitive oper- ations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes above and beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself’’ (Arnheim, 1969, p. 13), and that ‘‘What we need to acknowledge is that perceptual and pictorial shapes are not only translations of thought products but the very flesh and blood of thinking itself’’ (p. 134). C. Judson Herrick argues that ‘‘perception may be regarded as a behavior because we know by experiment that the polarization of the perceiving self against the objects perceived must be learned by actual experience gained through the motor responses made to the setup of sensory stimuli received’’ (Herrick, 1956, p. 339).
8. The definition of world view is summarized by W.T. Jones: ‘‘The world view of any individual is a set of very wide-range vectors [which he explains] in that indi- vidual’s belief space (a) that he learned early in life and that are not readily changed and (b) that have a determinate influence on much of his observable behavior, to the verbal and nonverbal, but (c) that he seldom or never verbalizes in the referential mode, though (d) they are constantly conveyed by him in the expressive mode and latent meanings’’ (Jones, 1972, p. 83).
9. David Canter claims that ‘‘It is to [Kenneth E.] Boulding that we owe the notion of an overall, all-pervading cognitive system: an image which embraces all our interactions with our surroundings’’ (Canter, 1977, p. 26).
10. He goes on to state that ‘‘A further important implication of place differen- tiation is that it leads to the identification of places within a wider network of re- actions. In recognizing a place as having a specific set of behaviours associated with it, it is also possible to anticipate that particular people will be found in those places’’
(Canter, 1977, p. 119). Another psychologist is even more emphatic on this point. She notes that ‘‘ythe perception of the physical features of the environment is inseparable
from affective, aesthetic, and normative assessments, that is to say, from a social evaluation. This evaluation depends upon the perception of objects, but exceeds that perception in complexity and significance’’ (Le´vy-Leboyer, 1982, p. 46).
11. For a full discussion of this concept, see Chapter 6, ‘‘Placelessness,’’ ofRelph (1976, pp. 79–121).
12. Thus, the terms topophilia and topophobia are used to distinguish these basic reactions to place. On the topophobic side, for example, Yi-fu Tuan has written a book about places that are likely to cause fear (Tuan, 1979). A review of environ- mental psychology research shows that, like every other cognitive system, place identity is meant to accomplish the cognitive backdrop function that enables people to recognize what they see, think, and feel in locations. Place identity primarily allows for discrimination between what is familiar and what is not in different environments (Bonnes & Secchiaroli, 1995, p. 188).
13. Psychologist Joachim Wohlwill asserts that ‘‘ythe physical environment does not only arouse strong affective reactions in the individual, but is frequently an object of approach and avoidance behavior, in a literal sense and on a large scale’’
(Wohlwill, 1970, p. 306). Art philosopher Susanne Langer explains the subtleties:
‘‘What we call a person’s ‘inner life’ is the inside story of his own history; the way living in the world feels to him. This kind of experience is usually but vaguely known, because most of its components are nameless, and no matter how keen our expe- rience may be, it is hard to form an idea of anything that has no name. It has no handle for the mind’’ (Langer, 1957, p. 7).
14. Taylor explains that ‘‘No one ever doubted that there were individual differ- ences, that one person differed from another. What is new in the modern era is that these have a specific kind of moral relevance. Although differences of endowment and temperament were thought to define relevant conditions for moral action y nowhere before the modern era was the notion entertained that what was essential to us might be found in our particular being. But this is the assumption underlying the identity question’’ (Taylor, 1988, p. 316).
15. He concludes that ‘‘All knowledge is both subjective and objective, or it would not be knowledge. The objective features are the information which it gives about the external object; the subjective features those which make itmyknowledge, namely, its relationship to my other past and present experiences, and any contribution which my brain may make to the representation of the object’’ (Brain, 1959, p. 33). Yi-fu Tuan finds a paradox in the thought process: ‘‘Here is a seeming paradox: thought creates distance and destroys the immediacy of direct experience, yet it is by thoughtful reflection that the elusive moments of the past draw near to us in present reality and gain a measure of permanence’’ (Tuan, 1977, p. 148). About the purpose of turning our thought inward, Charles Taylor says that ‘‘y we go to discover or impart some order, or some meaning or justification to our livesyTo the extent that this form of self-exploration becomes central to our culture, another stance of radical reflexivity becomes of crucial importance to us alongside that of disengage- ment. It is different from and in some ways antithetical to disengagement. Rather than objectifying our own nature, and hence classing it as irrelevant to our identity, it consists of exploring what we are in order to establish this identity because the assumption behind modern self-exploration is that we do not already know who we are’’ (Taylor, 1988, pp. 314–315).
16. An especially thought-provoking perspective on the social paradigm that has structured and maintained this assessment of the library is advanced most forcefully byHarris (1986).
17. Neurologist C. Judson Herrick observes that ‘‘An essential feature of percep- tual integration is the polarization of the perceiving subject against the things perceived, of the self against the not-self. This implies the presence of self-con- sciousness at a higher level of mentation than primitive undifferentiated ‘feeling,’ and this in turn is a prerequisite for that sharp contrast between perceptual knowledge and conceptual knowledge’’ (Herrick, 1956, pp. 349–350). Hannah Arendt explains that ‘‘It is in the nature of the human surveying capacity that it can function only if man disentangles himself from all involvement in and concern with the close at hand and withdraws himself to a distance from everything near him. The greater the distance between himself and his surroundings, world or earth, the more he will be able to survey and to measure and the less will worldly, earth-bound space be left to him’’ (Arendt, 1958, p. 251). Charles Taylor is more specific in terms of establishing and being guided by moral direction: ‘‘I want to defend the strong thesis that doing without frameworks is utterly impossible for us; otherwise put, that the horizons within which we live our lives and which make sense of them have to include these strong qualitative discriminationsyliving within such strongly qualified horizons is constitutive of human agency’’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 27).
18. In the estimation of John K. Wright, ‘‘Much of the world’s accumulated wisdom has thus been acquired, not from the rigorous application of scientific research, but through the skillful intuitive imagining – or insight – of philosophers, prophets, statesmen, artists, and scientists’’ (Wright, 1947, p. 6).
19. He explains that ‘‘the idea of comfort has developed historically. It is an idea that has meant different things at different times. In the seventeenth century, comfort meant privacy, which lead [sic] to intimacy and, in turn, to domesticity. The eight- eenth century shifted the emphasis to leisure and ease, the nineteenth to mechanically aided comforts – light, heat, and ventilation. The twentieth-century domestic engi- neers stressed efficiency and convenience’’ (Rybczynski, 1986, p. 231).
20. Sharing this understanding, Susanne Langer extends it: ‘‘It is perception molded by imagination that gives us the outward world we know. And it is the continuity of thought that systematizes our emotional reactions into attitudes with distinct feeling tones, and sets a certain scope for an individual’s passions’’ (Langer, 1953, p. 372).
21. Nicholas C. Burckel sets this issue in a larger context in his sanguine conclusion that ‘‘Technology enhances the library’s capability to extend its services and collections, but it does not replace the physical library. Digital technology in particular has dramatically increased the synergy of content and technology’’
(Burckel, 2006, p. 229). More specifically, Donald Lindberg, Director of the U.S.
National Library of Medicine, summarized a two-day symposium held in November 2004 on ‘‘The Library as Place: Building and Revitalizing Health Sciences Libraries in the Digital Age,’’ with his moderate, final comment that ‘‘the future is both print and electronic’’ (Klose, 2005, p. 19).
22. Susanne Langer describes the work of architecture: ‘‘The architect creates a culture’s image: a physically present human environment expresses the characteristic rhythmic functional patterns which constitute a cultureyArchitecture creates the
semblance of that World which is the counterpart of a Self. It is a total environment made visible’’ (Langer, 1953, p. 98). From a different perspective we are told by neurologist Sir Russell Brain that ‘‘y our awareness of the spatial relations of objects is never limited to perceptions of the objects themselves: it is imbued with past experiences of movement and time’’ (Brain, 1959, p. 33).
23. These perceptions of place are treated by the following writers:Arendt (1958), Baker (2000),Bennett (2005),Braverman (2000),Freeman (2005),Frischer (2005), Ludwig and Starr (2005), Rybczynski (1986), Simons, Young & Gibson (2000), Steele (1981),Tuan (1975),Walter (1988),Wright (2006).
24. Yi-fu Tuan analyzes the relevant values of symbolic space, which he says
‘‘offers good examples of how the human imagination works. Space becomes symbolic when it intimately conjoins human and social facts with those of nature.
Symbolic space is a mental artifact, necessary to the ordering of life, and so in this sense it is a practical venture; and yet it is also infused throughout with the aesthetic values of balance, rhythm, and affect. Symbolic spaces have different foundations and exist at different scales’’ (Tuan, 1993, p. 172).
25. Not the sole example, but a fine one, is the new Seattle Public Library (Marshall, 2004).
26. See the tribute to Tuan by J. NicholasEntrikin (2001).
27. Psychiatrist E.V. Walter follows Plato in clarifying this otherwise blurry idea: ‘‘Plato tells us that to grasp the nature of place, ‘we must try to express and make manifest a form obscure and dim.’ It lies outside both reason and sensation, to be apprehended by a kind of sensuous reasoning. ‘Some sort of bastard reasoning, which is hardly trustworthy,’ Plato writes, gives us the knowledge of place. It is not a legitimate kind of knowledge in his view, being neither within the rules of rational thought nor even a product of sensory experience, but some- thing else – a curious, spurious mode of grasping reality. It is a knowledge that must be ‘grasped,’ because it cannot be conceived and it cannot be perceived. Yet it is not less real than the objects of reason and perception’’ (Walter, 1988, pp. 121–122).
28. Susanne Langer writes that ‘‘Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of ‘felt life’yinto spatial, temporal and poetic structures. They are images of feeling that formulate it for our cognition. What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding’’ (Langer, 1957, p. 25).
29. Following is a selection of concurring views: ‘‘The sentiment [of place] is there, and we learn how strong it is when these small foci of our world are disturbed or threatened’’ (Tuan, 1975, p. 154); ‘‘yperception helps us organize external infor- mation so that we can feel that we ‘know’ something about what surrounds us and what is likely to happen to us. Having this information provides us with some control over our own fate, so that we are not always at the whim of unpredictable events.
The importance of this sense of control is brought home to us when we lose it, as in the experience of diving into murky water where sights and sounds are suddenly cut off’’ (Steele, 1981, p. 22); ‘‘Consequently simply asking questions about the future of libraries, let alone working to transform them for the digital age, almost inevitably evokes anguished, poignant, and even hostile responses filled with nostalgia for a near-mythical institution’’ (Campbell, 2006, p. 28).
30. A serious attempt to understand the reasons behind both aversion to and ignorance of the library place could prove useful in the creation of perceptions of library as place and of the library experience. This understanding could possibly even lead to an extension of the library’s horizons.
31. They define their terms: ‘‘transcendent, in the sense of buildings that delimit physicality through imaginative understanding and application of virtues; andtran- sportive, in design that uplifts the patron and enhances the unique experience of sensing past, present, and future simultaneously. It is thistranscendent/transportive coexistence, with particular reference to its local, place-specific manifestations, that distinguishes a library with what we are calling esprit de place, or spirit of place’’
(Demas & Scherer, 2002, p. 65).
32. For further discussion of the influence of corporate or organizational culture, seeOsburn (2007).
33. ‘‘Organizational climate has also been used to describe social contributions to a spirit of place. Many organizations impart a distinct feel or atmosphere to those who work in themyPhysical features help to create this climate, but a good portion of it is maintained by the ways that the social system impacts on people with its norms, rules policies, expectations, and management style’’ (Steele, 1981, p. 71).
Kenneth H. Craik made a similar observation early in the history of environmental psychology: ‘‘Unlike other attributes of places, institutional characteristics also relate to a social system which may extend beyond the spatial-physical setting itself’’
(Craik, 1971, p. 60).
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