| In the spring of 1996, San Francisco Public Library opened the doors of its long-awaited New Main building to rave architectural reviews and great public enthusiasm. Within a few months, however, the new library building came under attack for serious and fundamental flaws of design, operation, and perhaps most particularly, vision. The controversy which surrounded New Main quickly moved from local to a national status, thanks principally to the participation of author Nicholson Baker. In this dissertation I argue that the New Main, as well as the storm of controversy which surrounded its first year of operation, is best understood as a collection of stories and counter-stories about the politics, the values, priorities, and the cultures which were manifest in the processes of design and construction---and came to be inscribed in the library's structure---and most particularly about the unstable social and discursive context in which the library was designed and implemented. I explore that context, particularly focusing on the multiple and pervasive discourses of the death of cultural and material phenomena which proliferated at the close of the 20th century, and ask questions of the stories surrounding the New Main using techniques drawn from literary criticism and contemporary policy analysis, viewing the stories as sets of assumptions and assertions about the role, mission, relevance, and continued viability of large urban public library buildings, and about the importance of library buildings as object of study. |
