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Stand outside any entrance of Los Angeles’ Central Library, look up, and you see only tall buildings, all of them clearly dating from the mid-20th century and later. 611 Place, Aon Center, the twin towers of City National Plaza, and the Citigroup Center all bear the marks of the late 1960s and \u201870s; in the 1980s and \u201890s appeared the Gas Company Tower and, tallest of all, the U.S. Bank Tower, commonly known as the Library Tower. That last gets its nickname not from the presence of public library facilities on any of its 73 floors, but from the source of the air rights \u2013 literally, the legal right to build upward into the air \u2013 that allowed it rise to 73 floors in the first place. That skyscraper owes its existence to the library, but the library also owes its existence to that skyscraper.<\/p>\n
In this context of utilitarian verticality, an aesthetic common to downtowns across America since the time of postwar \u201curban renewal,\u201d the Central Library can look like a relic from an era of altogether different values. But when it first opened in 1926, it looked like an arrival from a future of altogether different values, having taken shape, after several revisions, in a style almost avant-garde in its use of hard geometric edges, raw concrete surfaces, abundant allusions to distant places and times \u2013 Egypt, Rome, Byzantium, the Islamic world \u2013 and a philosophical foundation in addition to its concrete one. The Los Angeles Public Library, having had to move from rented space to rented space since its founding in 1872, had finally arrived in its own permanent home: not just a building in which to store books, but a temple to knowledge itself.<\/p>\n
The design, both inside and out, makes that purpose explicit. At the top of one staircase a goddess statue has always stood, flanked by a pair of sphinxes and holding open a book whose pages offer a multilingual selection of quotations: the Bible’s \u201cIn the beginning was the word,\u201d Seneca’s \u201cKnowledge extends horizons,\u201d Keats’ \u201cBeauty is truth, truth beauty.\u201d Her body bears images of mankind’s progress from East to West: the Egyptian pyramids, the tablet of the Ten Commandments, the Parthenon, Notre Dame, the Liberty Bell, a procession of covered wagons. Her name is \u201cCivilization,\u201d and her creator is Lee Lawrie, a sculptor best known for the forcefully symbolic works made for some of the grander American buildings of the early 20th century, especially the bronze Atlas seen in front of Manhattan\u2019s Rockefeller Center (and on certain editions of Ayn Rand’s \u201cAtlas Shrugged\u201d).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n