I don't know where I've been for the past year, but somehow I managed not to visit the Boston Public Library until yesterday. That place is so nice! We went to see an exhibit of miniature books, which I was feeling a little skeptical about because the publicity poster showed an old, musty-looking book, and I was convinced that we'd be looking at a bunch of little Bibles. I was so wrong. The was a huge variety of books, from the complete works of Shakespeare in books smaller than a deck of cards, to a stamp-sized version of Edward Gorey's The Eclectic Abecedarium. The smallest book there was 0.9 mm square. Tiny!
In the next room over, there was an exhibit of posters from WWII, with slogans like, "America Needs Your Scrap Rubber," and "Save Waste Fats for Explosives". I was struck by how much the message of what constitutes patriotic consumerism has changed over time. These days (moreso right after 9/11, I think), buying a Hummer and eating a Big Mac means that we're not "letting the terrorists win". The posters we saw yesterday, by contrast, extolled the virtues of growing veggies in your Victory Garden (saving manufactured food for the troops) and traveling as slowly and as little as necessary (to reduce wear on rubber tires and to free up space on trains). What once was defined as patriotic would be considered decidedly less-so now; the values espoused in those old posters sound more like arguments for the modern-day environmental movement. Weird how values flip around like that.
Then we went out to the courtyard, which felt spectacular in the late afternoon sun with a cool September breeze blowing around. There were dozens of people sitting there reading the newspaper or typing on laptops. It looked like a great place to do schoolwork. I don't know if I'll ever make it out there to do work for grad school, but I'd like to. There were kids running around the fountain, but the scene was surprisingly quiet, cocooned as it was from the noise and bustle of Copley Square outside.
The BPL wasn't the only fantastic building we saw this weekend. On Friday, I went on a tour of MIT with Stephen and his brother. It was interesting to hear about the various pranks ("hacks") that students have pulled over the years, the history of the buildings, etc., but the whole point of the trip for me was to see Stata. We spent a good half hour there after the tour ended, running up and down the staircases and through the serpentine corridors, seeking out all of the little nooks and deciding where we'd like to have our offices. Creatively designed buildings like that really spark my imagination. I never want to be an architect--it's just not the kind of problem that I like to solve--but I love to be in well-designed spaces. It's unfortunate that interesting buildings are so rare. How often do we even notice the spaces we're in?
