“Beyond being a book repository, the ancient Library of Alexandria was a working resource for scholars. Joined physically to the “Mouseion” — a Greek word meaning a place where the Muses of myth are active — the library contained a lecture hall (“exedra”), a refectory for communal meals (“oikos”), and a covered walkway (“peripatos”), where scholars could walk in the shade with their books, debating, reading, and talking. This ancient image of the library as a place for scholars to collaborate, to eat, to read, and to think endures — even as we have experienced a sea change in how information is preserved, discovered, and shared in the digital age.

For millennia, libraries have been physical places where information and society intersect. Of course, information and society are not static. As clay tablets gave way to scrolls, and then to codices, and now digital texts, libraries have adapted. As literacy has become the norm, as the scholarly community has become more inclusive, as reading habits have changed, and as many of us have access to tens of thousands of texts on electronic devices, libraries have evolved. These sweeping changes in information technology and to social behaviors surrounding reading and learning invariably affect the library’s edifice.

David Adjaye, the 2016 recipient of the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT, is one of the preeminent architects responding to the changing needs of libraries. His Idea Stores in East London and his Francis Gregory Neighborhood Library and William O. Lockridge/Bellevue Library in Washington have revitalized the public library for the 21st century, while maintaining libraries’ abiding functions as communal spaces and cultural storehouses.”