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Overview
In The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges explores fundamental questions surrounding language and literature. He also explores the paradoxes of apparent human finitude inside infinite space and time.
In 2014 we built an art installation as an homage to that story by placing a bunch of empty handmade books into a library in the middle of the desert, a few thousand feet from a hundred-foot-tall man that would soon be incinerated.
I intend this page to serve as some form of documentation: a mini-wiki for a project with tens of thousands of hours invested in its initial, and so far only, debut. The DiSorient wiki was an inspiration for thinking about this as an archive rather than just a photo dump. I still hope we can gather many more photos, archive the remaining materials, and perhaps even build a permanent version one day.
I applied for and received a Burning Man grant for $15,000. A bunch of 20-year-old kids from Reno formed the primary crew. Along with mentors and well over a hundred volunteers, we were able to build a 45-foot wooden structure with 400 handmade books in about four months. I suspect well over 10,000 hours of work went directly into building the Library.
Structure
'means feet"means inches
The design was simple and modular. Facilitating the fabrication and construction processes, the Library was envisioned such that it could be prefabricated, built, and disassembled with as few steps, and as little complexity, as possible. It is humbling to remember how little construction experience much of the crew had at the start.
Inscribing the hexagonal exterior in a circle gave a diameter of 48', with a
24' interior hexagon to be built on the base and upon which the 25'
geodesic half-dome cupola would sit, reaching a maximum height of about 44'.
The six lower section walls were 24' x 16', each composed of six
4' x 16' subwalls. These dimensions were chosen so that we did not have to
cut much plywood. The upper walls were 12' x 10', with three subwalls
4' x 10'. The cuts we made in this upper section necessarily broke the
regular symmetry pattern.
Exterior
Peter was responsible for these designs. We were inspired by the girih tile patterns found across the Islamic architectural canon, and hoped to pay homage to the early Persian discovery of advanced constructions using what today are called quasicrystals.
Interior
One of the ideas that really inspired me was how interpretation was, in some sense, a greater infinity than the initial construction itself. I suppose the “completion of the piece” happened at the end of Burning Man, but the books pay an invaluable homage to much of the wider community around Burning Man 2014. Even though the books were almost empty at the beginning of the week, many people who did not attend that year had already contributed to the project.
I wanted these notions of multiple infinities to converge through the design, rather than taking Borges’ strict description literally. We CNC’d the shelving and seating so that they could fully envelop the walls and embed the burners directly into the installation.
We cut angle jigs and inserted extra angled 2x4s so we could attach the
ribbed pieces continuously, starting from the middle of a wall and spaced
evenly at [2.5, 5.0, 7.5, 10.0, 12.5, 15.0] degrees at a vertex of the
exterior hexagon. This was by far the most confusing and difficult part of the
project, both in the fabrication and installation phases.
Paper / Books
Originally, I had imagined a Library adopting the exactitude described in Borges’ rigid architecture. Then I met Rory, an artist whose craft is paper, and the decision was made to bind our own handmade books out of recycled materials.
We hoped to re-inspire the act of writing itself, using words from telephone books, junk mail, and sometimes even drafts of the Library folded back into the pages. Writing on top of scrambled, nonlinear chunks of source material gave the space its own infinite interpretive life, despite being only a single hexagonal room.
Image Gallery
Exterior and approach
Interior details
