when you open a book, the person pops out, and becomes you

Ray Bradbury on why we read.

“…you’re very curious, aren’t you, to find out how I fell in love with books. Now remember this, love is the center of your life. The things that you do should be things that you love, and things that you love should be things that you do. So that’s what you learn from books… You see, libraries is people. It’s not books. People are waiting in there, thousands of people, who wrote the books. So it’s much more personal than just a book. So when you open a book, the person pops out, and becomes you… So you find the author who can lead you through the dark. And Shakespeare started me there… and Emily Dickinson led the way for me, and Edgar Allen Poe said, ‘This way. Here’s the light’. So you go into the library, and discover yourself.”

—Ray Bradbury.

https://youtu.be/Pqp38_uS-eg

 

Posted for #StudioBilbio, a studio/seminar on the architecture of public libraries.

the most imaginative teaching hearth ever built

“Imagine... a Yestermorrow architecture, imaginative enough and large enough to enclose everything in a single structure... that lures, calls, leads, and pulls you from one area to the next.

...Imagine... an art gallery enclosing a museum, enclosing a library, enclosing a university, enclosing a theater. Five concepts, five environments, five ways of seeing life. Each circling, each rounding the other.

...Why a theater at our architectural core? Well, isn't life one drama topping another? Isn't everything theater? 

...Try to imagine any human activity that does not finally shape itself into vivid metaphors spoken, acted, taught. 

...stepping through from circle to circle, what would we find?

...An architecture, in sum, it seems to me, as marvelous as those rounded self-encircling nautilus shells found along the shores of our seas. Easy to build? In the mind, yes. With glass, brick, stone, and mortar? Difficult. And expensive. 

...What a pomegranate experience. What an incredible womb... Will it be built between now and the century's end? ....can it be the most imaginative teaching hearth ever built to warm our minds? I say it can be done. I wish it to be so.”

– Ray Bradbury, excerpts from "Yestermorrow Place" [1988] 

in Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures, Capra Press 1991, p 77-80.