[I wrote this for a journalism class.]
There is only one thing in the lobby of Firestone that is taller than a man, and that is the single column that stands near but not contiguous with the glass wall that separates the lobby and the Trustee Reading Room. The next tallest thing in the room is a white marble ‘O’ on a pedestal, a sculpture titled “White Sun” by Isamu Noguchi. A little lower are the guards who check your identity upon entry and search your bag upon exit, salaried substitutes for the seven-foot tall plastic rectangles in nearly every other library. These guards sit at a desk-barrier that divides the room in two. I could go on with this list, starting at about eight feet and concluding with the calf-high table-bench inscribed with a Historical dedication to the infinity of the written word, without missing more than one or two items of interest. It is a very horizontal room.
In its coloring the room is even more understated: there is only one thing not tan or brown or silver, and that’s that white marble sun. The walls and the unfortunate column are paneled wood; posterity’s coffee table is a lighter brown with bronze writing; the rows of card catalogs visible in the next room are a better-lit nest of wood, faded tan labels and metal grips; the guard’s barrier is trimmed with steel and divided into sections demarcated by off-white Helvetica signs—one of which is a truer white when, every now and then, it glows. It is a very brown room; it is that era when decorators considered metal in need of offsetting wood and wood in need of paneling; it is 1971.
I find a certain sweetness in the lobby’s aesthetic, a concern for the most human, even familial, instincts of the visitor. (I am going to resist using the adjective “seventies,” and especially its variant “so seventies,” to describe the lobby; in that resistance I would like the reader to resist conflating the lobby’s feel with the televised “seventies” aesthetic that rolled in earlier this decade—and has now already gone, as far as I can tell.) This concern differentiates the lobby from the brash cleanliness of modernist architecture or the ornate ahistoricism of collegiate gothic; it’s a design about you, and the places you’ve lived, and the comfort you’ve found in them.
The lobby’s dusk of browns is preserved by a noticeable weakness in the artificial light, and undisturbed by what natural illumination manages to shine through from distant windows in other rooms. The lobby’s own lighting has been recessed a foot or two behind some kind of plastic grating, in long strips that run along the joint between the walls and the ceiling. One imagines that the grating was overlaid to dim the inhumanity of fluorescence, and it does; it also throws the room in darkness and gives the wood closest to the ceiling a sickened whitish hue. It’s ugly but not severely, in a manner too well-intended to resent. This is the ugliness of your den’s overly shaded lamp and the maroon rug that, though quite fetching in the store, is all wrong in its sluggish light.
If you follow the bleached strip along the wall you will eventually reach, at a ridiculous fifteen feet off the center, a bronze clock. A frilled hour hand and a slim featureless minute hand rotate around a silver button, marking time against eight roman numerals and four symbols: a stallion with what appear to be several horns, 3; an eight-pointed star topped by a crown, 6; a cartoon fox, 9; a hand with a six-pointed star on the tip of its fingers and a heart carved into its palm, 12. Magnified and inscrutable, this trinket is the room’s weirdest touch, ugly in its unearned scale and grandeur.
Firestone’s lobby offers a few different types of aesthetic failure, unified only by their association with a decade I haven’t experienced. The lack of spatial aspiration, the metallically reinforced homeliness, the humanizing gloom, kitsch bearing too great a symbolic load. It’s as dense and cluttered and unintended as the final form of a lived-in home, and as touching as an uneventful accumulation of years. Temporally, it’s very hard to place; I’ve already mentioned the ready-to-hand “seventies,” but that doesn’t suffice. The card catalog is a 1948 original, as is the WPA-style “Federal Documents Depository” insignia outside the main doors—but the white sun is from 1966, the paneling 1971 and the clock another universe. Too many ideas and intentions have spilled over into the space, the legacy of generations of contributors united only by their disdain for revisionism and charitable respect for each other’s difference. It is a room doomed to ugliness and overcrowding by its tolerance, and all the sweeter for it.
There is still one more wonderful thing: a small history of Princeton University in a long glass case, totaling maybe five hundred words with twenty-five pictures. Its tone is whimsical, as such limitations require: there is a swatch of fabric worn by alumni during the “P-Rade”; a photograph of “[Former] Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld ‘54,” in a wrestler’s singlet pointing a victor’s thumbs-up; four postage stamps depicting Nassau Hall; a photograph of a 2003 Princeton University Players’ performance of “Pippin,” “one of many that year”; and, in what might be the longest section, a description of the plot and historical importance of the 1951 Cary Grant film People Will Talk, shot on campus. The notion of the thing is only slightly less absurd than a brief sociological snapshot of American life (bleachers, the Sharper Image, tax cuts), and slightly more than the scrapbook my mother kept for me with one page per year (thirteen: a photograph of my first communion; sixteen: khakis and sneakers and sun-squinting on a beach).
As I write this, the “BOOK RETURN” sign just came back on. It will burn for another twenty minutes, the uneven light behind the second ‘O’ upsetting Helvetica’s perfect weight, as hand-drawn as illuminated text could ever be.
