The Order of Libraries: Universities and Truth

Reinhold Martin

At a moment when truth is a controversial topic, this lecture looks at its technical infrastructure. Beginning with OMA’s new Qatar National Library at Education City in Doha and rewinding history from there, the lecture will explore the architecture of libraries, and in particular of university libraries, as media systems. From the European and North American nineteenth century to the present, we will ask: What forms of order do libraries construct? And, what is the relationship between that order and the difficult but quite real production, maintenance, and distribution of truth?

CV
Reinhold Martin is Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, where he directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and chairs the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Martin is a founding co-editor of the journal Grey Room and has published widely on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture. He is the author of The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (MIT, 2003), Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minnesota, 2010), and The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City (Minnesota, 2016). He is currently working on a history of the American university as a media complex.