UK

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, during a period of technological change, design guidance and standards for lighting in early public libraries were formulated at a rapid pace. With the aid of philanthropy, libraries began to proliferate across Britain and America. The emergence of this new typology within polluted industrialised towns exacerbated the requirements of daylight design and increased the desire for electric light as it became more widely available. These functional buildings, as “free libraries, ” were also required to invent precedents for new kinds of publicly accessible interiors. A detailed case study of Wednesbury Library, by Crouch, Butler and Savage, 1908, examines how contemporary theory, formulated in response to economic and environmental constraints, affected the delivery of this new form of public light in practice