LA Library's Hundred Years Built on Curation, Not Utility

The Los Angeles Public Library's central branch turned 100 this week.

It's a stunning art deco building in downtown LA, designed by Bertram Goodhue and finished in 1926, with a pyramid roof covered in turquoise and gold tiles and a reading room that still feels like the most important room you've ever entered. During the anniversary celebration, thousands of people showed up.

The building has been a film location for Heat and Ghostbusters and countless others. It holds three million books. But watch what everyone celebrating this building is actually claiming without saying it out loud.

They're claiming that a library's relevance is architectural — that longevity itself is proof of purpose. They're claiming that a hundred years of existence means the thing it does still matters. But they're not defending what it actually does. Not really.

Libraries have spent fifteen years trying to justify themselves on the only metric that matters to city councils. That metric is functional utility. You want information? Google has it faster. You want research? Databases do it better.

Which was this. Curation. Serendipity. The experience of moving through space where someone else made choices about what matters. You got to encounter those choices without having asked for them. That's not transactional.

The LA Public Library survives because enough people in 2024 still want what a library actually is. But the celebration this week reveals the trap. You can build a case for it on aesthetics and history and cultural significance. Those are comfortable arguments. They don't require you to ask whether your own city still values the kind of thinking that happens when you don't already know what you're looking for.