The ancient "art of memory" technique calls for the construction of an imaginary "palace" containing different rooms in which to store one's thoughts. As a suggestion to future builders of memory palaces (and the destinations for wandering attention spans during lectures), the ceiling of the lecture room is punctuated with models of famous domes and vaults of world architecture. Selections include Hagia Sophia, the Pantheon, Chartres Cathedral, a Native American long house, a Mayan temple, a pagoda, and the Sydney Opera House.
Two parallel walls in the Lower Level are covered with millwork derived from Pieter Breughel's depiction of the Tower of Babel (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Mirrors occupying the window frames of the millwork reinforce the theme of infinite reproduction. It is a grand meditation on the monumental and reflective nature of language.
Approximately the size of a French horn, a brass-plated, perforated sculptural representation of an inner ear replaces the grill of a public-address speaker in the ceiling of the Music Section. "The most perfect music is soundless," said the Daoist philosopher Laozi. Beethoven’s later compositions, produced after the onset of his deafness, are the result of an inner, intellectual hearing, and are considered by most performers to be his most far-reaching and exploratory work.
A reading chair upholstered in bright canary yellow, situated amid the stacks on this subterranean level, recalls the history of mining south of San José. The fragile birds in cages or "mineshaft canaries" that used to warn miners parallels the role of libraries as cultural institutions whose health and vigor testifies to the well-being of the societies that support them. This over stuffed, vinyl clad version of "Tweety Bird" contends that we can also stay healthy with humor and comfort.
A digital reader mounted on a wall adjacent to the checkout counter displays a real-time record of the total number of books checked out of the library system.
Honoring a desire expressed by members of the English Department faculty to immortalize the Bard, the artists designed a mechanized light clock that projects a "constellation" based on Shakespeare’s portrait across a wall adjacent to a collection of his works. The image, appearing briefly and randomly once each day, comments on Shakespeare's daily applicability to human drama and discourse. His lit visage will not escape Brutus' comments in Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene 1: "The exhalations whizzing in the air - Give so much light that I may read by them."
One of the founders of the Santa Clara Franciscan monastery, Father Magin Català is said to have foreseen the coming of the Anglo-Americans, the railroad, the discovery of gold and the 1906 earthquake and fire, in dreams that came while he slept on his adobe pillow. This chair-sized pillow, fabricated from adobe with flakes of gold, steel particles and ash, alludes to those dreamlike prognostications of history. It is a playful element in the California Room, an area otherwise dedicated to serious historical research.
As do all great libraries and all great mystery novels, the Circulating Books Section boasts a secret rotating bookcase. One side of the shelf is stocked with faux mystery books, the other side with current popular-fiction titles.
The gateway to the Library's Special Collections displays 88 golden carburetors. The construction of the gateway recalls the form of the Golden Gate Bridge, an emblem of the utopian hopes and dreams of California and an organic part of the state's highway culture. The carburetors also recall the ranks of bodhisattva images in a Buddhist shrine, suggesting the sacred and infinitely elusive quality of such dreams. The embrace of alternative religions and the car as a California Cultural icon are elements which make California what it is today.
A hand hammered brass gong is designed after the San José Scale, a parasite that nearly destroyed the fruit orchards of the area in the 1880's. Chinese laborers blamed for this pestilence, lead one of America's first labor revolts. Below the gong, behind glass, is a mallet whose head is of embroidered silk. The pattern and color of the mallet is based on the Asian ladybug, its natural predator. This commemoration of past dangers, natural remedies, persecutions, and call to activism, is located adjacent to the agriculture section.
A little "door" surrounded by an ornate façade is located at the base of the wall of the southernmost elevator. Easily noticed by children, it evokes an Alice in Wonderland potential of going down (and up) the rabbit hatch into another world. The artwork suggests a dialogue between the construction of imaginary spaces by author Lewis Carroll and of built spaces by famous architect Louis Sullivan. As Carroll animated the movement of childhood imagination, Sullivan necessitated the elevator with his skyscrapers.
A corner fireplace (without fire) is built from bricks cast in the shape of books and marble selected for its smoky tendrils. This artwork, sited in a quiet reading area, speaks to the history of book burning. These books are resistant to fire to honor the immortality of ideas while lamenting the loss of others.
The grill covers of the building's HVAC system have been masked with a sculptured surface using patterns derived from the breathing apparatus of living forms: in this case stomata , the respiration pores on plant leaves. As nature breathes, so too does the building breathe.
The path of Migration begins with the ascension of thousands of brilliantly colored cast metal Monarch butterflies along the brilliant blue wall of the South East stairwell. The butterflies escape the stairwell and migrate toward the book stacks resting on the ceiling. Their destination is not arbitrary, but marks the location of significant books by Latin American authors of various disciplines. Migration acknowledges the contributions of these authors and further reinforces the concept of "circulation" - both of books and knowledge - as a major goal of the library.
Watering holes in the desert are landmarks and campsites where stories have been exchanged for millennia. Many of our fairy tales have been inspired by the nomadic tribes who traversed these lands. In homage to nomadic weavers and storytellers, the carpet and furniture designs in the Children's Area (including mobile shelving, seating, computer tables and the storytelling theater) were developed jointly by the artists and architects on the basis of traditional geometric patterns and colors.
The nineteenth-century idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel noted that "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk" - meaning that philosophy comes to understand a way of life just as it passes away. He had in mind the transition from eighteenth-century feudalism to nineteenth-century commercialism and democracy. A sculptural cast of a great horned owl, perched within a darkened niche, waits to take flight over the philosophy and psychology sections.
As patrons walk between two rows of book stacks, they trigger recorded sounds of a page turning, followed at the end of the corridor by the sound of a book closing. Books contain "passages"; the reading of a book can also be a passage to a new way of seeing the world.
The transformation and personalization of mass-produced cars parallels the process of reading, promoting transformation, personal movement and creativity. East Side Story is a chopped down bicycle supporting a table detailed with stories of San José's east side. The '48 Chevy Fleetline is a table activated with electric lifts. Table of Milagros incorporates thousands of Latin American traditional charms. The designs, selected through an area-wide competition and fabricated locally, celebrate creative local enterprise.
Creating a continuing commentary on water usage and industrial erosion, one of the three sinks within each of the men’s and women’s bathrooms is sculpturally eroded, progressing from the Eighth to the Third Floor.
The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799. Its trilingual inscription, which made it possible to decipher hieroglyphics, is recognized as an image for the mutual intelligibility of diverse languages. Rosetta's glass face is permanently etched with the inscription from the original Rosetta Stone. Behind the glass is an LED board on which appear fleeting digital messages, including an anthology of multi-lingual writing from or about San José, a bulletin board for public announcements related to the library, and hexagrams from the Chinese classic Book of Changes. For more information see Rosetta Screen.
Eighty-one leather chairs, each marked with one of the forty-three cattle brands of the original San Jose ranchos (as recorded in 1819), "range" freely on the 2nd floor.
If "Skep" is an old word for a beehive made of straw, and a spectacle is something to behold, and being skeptical is advised while beholding this complicated world, then Skeptacle, is a giant bookcase crafted to contain the thesis volumes produced by generations of San Jose State University students. The Skeptacle's majestic spiral form honors the boundless investigation of the thesis authors, as well as their bee-like creative and intellectual productivity.
Aesop's fox disparaged the grapes he was unable to reach, saying that they were sour. Sprouting from the ceiling in the business and economics reading room, this twisted and tortured wrought-iron vine, ripe with full green glass fruit, can be desired or dismissed as the potentially 'sour grapes' of economics. The sculptural installation can be reviewed as a sly comment on the early agricultural economy of the San José area, and the data-harvesting economy that has replaced i.
A diorama at ankle height is located within the exterior wall of the Steinbeck Collection. Steinbeck described "the process of rediscovery" as follows: "A young, inquisitive and original man might one morning find a fissure in the traditional technique of thinking. Through this fissure he might look out and find a new external world about him." The fissure contains soil samples from the Oklahoma-to-California path of migration outlined in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, as well as artifacts from San Jose State University's Steinbeck Collection.
These five functional reading tables, located adjacent to the geology section, map the shape of the major continental plates. The granite of each table was quarried from the continent it recalls. The tables are on casters, referring to the tectonic activity of the earth's surface, ever evident in California. They can be brought together or used individually.
A tenfold light fixture above the children's story telling area alludes through its layout to a 19th century diagram of the Sephirotic Tree, a symbolic Arabic and Jewish mapping of the connections of life, language and belief.
A magnificent Redwood tree which had been growing on the site prior to construction of the Library had to be cut down to accommodate the new building. The tree was hauled cross-country, milled by the artists into veneer and returned to clad a series of columns within the building. The reconstructed trunk begins on the lower level and reaches to the top floor.
Beneath certain book stacks located throughout the library lie underground "vaults" holding books that have been banned, burned or otherwise intentionally set aside in history.
A group of standard office chairs, each sporting an additional pair of legs, nest and socialize near the natural science section that is home to books on entomology.
A vessel, formed in the shape of the redoubled profile of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., glows with a light, emanating colors of skin tones, representing the ethnic composition of the citizens of San Jose (as recorded by the 2000 census). This vessel with its ever-changing representative light, is filled with the symbolic "content of our [collective] character," is located adjacent to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. historical exhibit.
The glass windows on the 7th Floor Bridge (located near the library's art and art history holdings) appear cracked. On closer scrutiny, the cracks match the breaks in Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass (also known as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even). An even closer inspection reveals that the cracked lines are comprised of jokes and puns, sand-blasted into the surface of the glass. Duchamp shattered art-making tradition, using puns, irony and complicated layering to emphasize the conceptual over the retinal.
This artwork is composed of white leather-bound books inserted among the mathematics collection. Zeno of Elea, in the 6th century BC, argued that motion was impossible. His reasoning was that since the space between any two points can be infinitely subdivided (halved, then halved again, then halved again...), no moving object could ever reach its goal. This series of leather books, shrinking progressively, manifests Zeno's mathematical construction.
