What a ring of shelving does to a reading room
Notes from the reading-room study on shelving as partition, pendant lights as ceiling, and why the quietest seat is in the middle.
We keep a folder of rooms we did not design but would like to have. The reading floor in our reading-room study went into it the first time we saw it, and it has come out on the desk more often than anything else.
Shelving as partition
The shelves stand in a ring instead of along the walls. That one decision divides the room without a single partition: there is an inside, an outside and a threshold between them wherever the ring opens. A reader can choose how enclosed to be by choosing which side of the books to sit on.
Lights as a ceiling
Under a high steel roof, the pendants do the work of a lower ceiling. Hung at one height in a loose grid, they give the eye a plane to rest on, and the roof above them stops mattering.
What we would test
We would like to know how daylight reaches the centre of the ring. From the photograph alone we cannot tell, and it would decide whether the quiet middle is a place people choose or a place they are left with.