Los Angeles Public Library – Central Library

Los Angeles Public LibraryLos Angeles Public LibraryLos Angeles Public LibraryLos Angeles Public Library

Over the West-facing entrance of the Central Library, the following words are inscribed: Et Quasi Cursores, Vitai Lampada Tradunt.  In translation, “Like runners, they hand on the torch of life.”  This quote is appropriate for a library as books are a medium through which we transfer knowledge.  But though our Central Library is the third largest collection of books and periodical holdings in the United States, this 1926 landmark acts as so much more than a bookshelf.

Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue’s architectural design alone makes this building standout.  The Mediterranean influences are standard for Southern California, but the Egyptian Revival influences are particular to the 1920’s in the wake of the 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb.  These notes, however, are only about structural impressions.  What I find most exciting about this library is how people use it.   It’s a museum, a first date, a field trip, a private sanctuary, and a community center.

Learn more about the Central Library art, architecture, and services here: http://www.lapl.org/central/

Advertisements

Posted on February 27, 2012, in Downtown and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
https://losangelesloveaffair.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/los-angeles-public-library-central-library/
losangelesloveaffair.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-22
73823
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:KOJ7Q6HLRE25KQKCS7G2LV6C2I2P5TT6
<urn:uuid:d7cf3125-1f0c-478b-aa41-4910af9835b3>
2017-05-30T12:58:46Z
192.0.78.13
text/html
sha1:7TURGWGYS5T7JCHSR7SF6FPX4QNWUKVQ
<urn:uuid:601c7215-ad2e-4310-9368-fc418d962dc1>
https://losangelesloveaffair.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/los-angeles-public-library-central-library/
length
response
<urn:uuid:2c23c69e-36fe-4e34-9c1f-1721357c7049>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-185-224-210.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-22
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf