Via @bookpatrol comes a Freshome article about a peculiar library in one German city:
Magdeburg, Germany, is the place where you can visit and admire the Open Air Library. With a budget of $325,000 Euros, the library was built on a surface of 488 square meters. The project started in 2005, when residents of an abandoned district centre in East Germany used crates to build a district library and donated books filled the shelves of the former district library’s site. KARO Architekten were commissioned to build the modern Open Air Library we can see today. The abandoned industrial landscape was adorned with a fantastic urban experiment in the shape of a modern library, constructed from pieces of the modernist facade of the old HORTEN warehouse of the City of Hamm, built back in 1966. With no need for registration, the public library gathers readers in a contemporary outdoor setting. Readers can take books and bring them back or bring other ones in exchange, so that everyone can enjoy this open place and the knowledge it brings.
With crates and books, a group of people created a system constructed on reciprocity in the midst of a space ravaged and abandoned by the operation of capitalism. Sound familiar?
The Open Air Library seems, both in its genesis and its continuing function, to be strikingly (if strangely!) similar to the Occupy Wall Street library. This is, indeed, a library the people built.
If nothing else, it embodies quite vividly a conviction that a public culture based on coming together, on just exchange and collective will, can take shape in the world—and sometimes quite literally transform the landscape.
