Gowanus Canon
with critic Brennan Buck
with critic Brennan Buck
“... the best defence against a common-knowledge attack on democracy is exposure, not censorship”
-NYTimes Op-Ed, following the 2016 presidential election
The
Canon attempts to address the responsibility of the library program to provide consituents with access to free, unbiased informaion. As the last leg of adult education and the first contact to literature for many children, the library must be programmed in a way that such access is not just possible, but unavoidable.
The Gowanus Canon is named such due to the “canon” of knowledge found in its center. The main method of circulation is a spiralling ramp holding books that introduce patrons to every subject in the Dewey Decimal system - promising passive exposure even without active interest. Additional reading rooms can be accessed at points tangent to the ramp, whereby more holdings on the corresponding subject matter can be found.
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