Design
The building was designed by the architect Solon S. Beman and modeled after Beman's Merchant Tailors Building, the domed temple facing the lagoon in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and the Erechtheum at the Athenian Acropolis. Greek Mythology teaches that Demeter, the goddess, bestowed agriculture and civilization upon the world during Erechtheus's reign. The library's rotunda murals have thematic titles: "Labor", "Literature", "Art" and "Science".
The following is a summary of the building's features: Tiffany style dome; Marble column and walls in the rotunda and foyer; 4 overhead rotunda murals painted by Oliver Dennett Grover, mural painter for the World Columbian Exposition; 1 in (2.5 cm) square Italian marble mosaic flooring; glass-floored mezzanine; 2,800 pounds (1,300 kg) bronze plate, solid copper core outer front doors; 2 150 pounds (68 kg) lbs. bronze and glass inner doors; 12 inches (30 cm) thick granite walls; and ionic columns.
The building's adult reading room is equipped with mahogany furniture specifically designed for the space. It also contains matching built-in shelving and custom-made bronze lamps. The circulation desk area has two-tiered bronze-trimmed book stacks. The mezzanine floor is composed of glass blocks.
Read more about this topic: Blackstone Library
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life ... for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,—some of its virus mingled with my blood.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)