America, land of the grand library

These words are being written in the fourth-floor reading room of the Minneapolis Public Library, a $110-million (U.S.) building that opened last year, one of a series of arresting examples of modern architecture that are redefining this heartland city.

The 355,000-square-foot library, designed by the New York architect Cesar Pelli, opened in May, 2006, six years after the voters of Minneapolis approved its funding in a referendum.

...

This is the age, we are told, of reading's decline. Yet across the United States, civic authorities don't seem to believe it. They take their libraries seriously, more seriously than we do in Canada where, Vancouver and Montreal aside, cities lack proper libraries.

The Ottawa Public Library building is the worst in Canada, and maybe the biggest library dump in North America. Metropolitan Toronto's reference library is showing its age. The libraries of the larger Prairie cities are inadequate. Wealthy Calgary is thinking about something new, but no decisions have been taken.

Globe and Mail - Americans' public spirit and public spending

Ottawa actually had a Carnegie library

but it was demolished and replaced with... wait for it...

Yes, that brutal concrete pile in the foreground is the Ottawa Public Library.

Yay 1974!  What a wonderful era for architecture.

A logical place for a new Public Library would have been across from the old train station (which should, logically, become a train station once again).  But instead at that location they built the most featureless building I have ever seen, a blank cube of condos.  I would describe it as a Borg cube landed in the middle of Ottawa, but that would be an insult to the Borg.

Logic being notably absent from such decisionmaking, most of the talk for the new Ottawa Central Public Library is to put it... out in the suburbs somewhere.  Because nothing's more central than the suburbs, apparently.  And Union Station languishes as an under-used conference centre surrounded by a tangle of streets and bizarre concrete constructions.

You can observe the grinding wheels of progress in non-motion at the OPL page on Libraries for Ottawa.

UPDATE 2007-08-27: Well, what the OPL page used to show, as indicated in current Google cache and on Archive.org, is

New Central Library Project

• Developing a Vision for a new Central Library in Ottawa
          September, 2005
• New Central Library FAQ
• Ottawa Public Library Board reports:          
  • October 17, 2005  Dispositions  Minutes
  • November 14, 2005  Dispositions
  • December 14, 2005   Minutes
  • January 16, 2006 Communication & Counsel: New Central Library Update
                Action: New Central Library Update
  • February 13, 2006 New Central Library Report  Dispositions
  • March 20 ,2006 Libraries for Ottawa Roadmap   Dispositions

For reasons known only to the powers that be, today the page has been updated with 2006 numbers, and everything except the last two documents has disappeared from the Central Library Project section.

ENDUPDATE

There's no money for a new central library, but, as Urban Meltdown - the blog reports:

In 2007, Ottawa will build a record 200 kilometers of new residential roads and spend $167 million on the top ten arterial road projects.

Previously:
July 02, 2006  the new Greenboro District Library
November 20, 2005  Ottawa Citizen column on libraries