I write this column to try to legitimize a view that may be among the more sacrilegious views an N.C. State student can hold these days. It’s up there with saying things like, “I hope UNC wins,” or “My philosophy degree’s worth more than your engineering degree.” But they’re legitimate opinions, and this is as well — no one should hesitate in speaking it if they believe in it. So people, you can say it, loudly and proudly: “James B. Hunt Jr. Library sucks.”
From the outside, it looks like an attempt to marry a battering ram and the Dorton Arena. From the inside, it looks like the architects tried to mix the color scheme of Silicon Valley’s Googleplex with the neon messages of New York City’s Times Square … and ended up in an Ikea somewhere in Kansas. From either side, it looks like they were shooting for the future. And this is subjective — but that’s why it has to be established as a legitimate view: Futuristic design is crappy, and especially so for a library. And when it comes to Hunt, the exterior seems hollow — which it is, spatially — and its interior seems frivolous. Hunt Library is form for its own sake, incessantly and obnoxiously shrieking out, “Aren’t you impressed already? I have robots and swirly blue signs!”
A place of learning, the highest form of which civilization has always found in the library, should exude an atmosphere of erudition. It should arouse in us a delight to acquire knowledge, a delight that is unique to us as humans. It should make us aware of the fabulousness of such endeavors and thus make us feel remarkable about being human. But anything that tries to impress by sheer weight of its futurosity and its technological coolness feels dehumanizing. So overbearing is Hunt’s self-justifying form that it takes precedence over the human, over that for which it is actually meant. How can one marvel in the future if one is simply reduced to a mere object in it?
Basically, a library should feel like a library. And Hunt doesn’t. It feels like a gaudy Dubai mall. It feels like an international airport lounge. It feels like a place where the most apt music would be techno remixes of Breaking Benjamin. It feels like a place where, if you’re reading The New Yorker or The Autobiography of Malcolm X or even The Origin of Species, you’d be shamed into hiding that and instead picking up an XML textbook or, at best, Wired magazine.
Finally, but not at all least importantly, bookBots. Maybe the wise people who designed Hunt Library, or rather, designed Hunt Library to impress, thought that browsing through bookshelves is a pain for us students. But bookBots take away from us an inalienable right of studenthood — the right to chaotically, unpredictably stumble across new knowledge. With bookBots, our full potential — our unlimited scope to learn — is limited. bookBots take away from us the pure pleasure of holding books in our hands and feeling them out before indulging in them. They take away from us the sheer joy of chancing upon new worlds of wisdom and words that we didn’t know existed … right next to the knowledge we were seeking! bookBots are an affront to living the life of the mind to the fullest, to the simple joys of life such as browsing through bookshelves. bookBots — a perfect example of where technological fanaticism can lead us — are alone enough a reason to disapprove of Hunt Library.
This is for everyone who finds solace in the warm and cozy, golden quiet room on the east side of D.H. Hill Library. This is for everyone who gets lost in the Stacks looking for a book and ends up finding new worlds. This is for taste, for being human and for the uncompromising wonder of knowledge. A windowless pile of bricks it may be, but if D.H. Hill is the present, I shall gladly live in it.
