[Last night via EVG reader Russ]
If all goes well, then St. Mark's Bookshop will open
Meanwhile, the owners offered a sneak preview of their space designed by Clouds Architecture Office here. (Warning: Architect speak ahead!)
The book shelving is designed to stimulate the ocular experience. Vertical supports are pulled back to pronounce the horizontal edges of the shelving. Sharp corners are eliminated, smoothed into a continuous series of horizontal bands which allow the eye to glide around the space without visual friction. Vision is further privileged by adjusting the form of the shelving. Lower runs are canted so as to tilt book spines towards eye level of the viewer. Section titles are literally etched into the wood of the shelving to maintain the continuity of the lines.
St. Mark's Bookshop left their home of 22 years at 31 Third Ave. and Stuyvesant Street at the end of June.
18 comments:
Maybe they are constantly going out of business because they are the type of business owners that spend money to hire a architect firm to design fucking bookshelves to stimulate the ocular experience. I don't want to see these guys with there hand out again
their language speaks volumes about why the bookshop is failing to attract customers.
cutting edge st. marks to sustainable locavore avenue a.
yes - good books will be available to humans. The pod people don't like books, they get offended and scared by anything not mediated by their pods, I mean cell phones devices.
IMO the idea ought to be how to squeeze as many books into the small space as possible. If at the same time visual friction is cut down and one's ocular experience is stimulated, all the better.
Real life will eventually intrude when tables with books piled high that will eventually, inevitably populate the empty center of the room, demolishing the architects' privileged lines of vision.
Fortunately imagination goes beyond the covers and into the space design for the new SMB. The old store interior was striking !
Anonymous @8:33 nailed it. This is an idiotic move by them.
Just because it is good/progressive/contemporary design does not mean it has to be expensive. It doesn't cost any more to hire a good architect than it does to hire a bad one. More people should think this way.
Sadly, many people are offended, and even angered by simply seeing something that is perhaps different to what they have seen before. I for one am very excited about this. Finally there will be something of interest for me to look at on that dreadful block, on my walks home from Key Food..
@anon 12:33
I have no problem with the design. I have a problem with a private business that cries poverty for years and begs the community to keep them afloat like a non-profit and then drops a bunch of money an architect and PR.
I'm glad EVG is here to keep tabs on them and keep us from forgetting how incompetent they've been. These owners will undoubtedly be playing the victim again soon and asking for a bailout.
I like books. Sadly, I've dedicated my life to making the dumb things, yet I can tell you: I hate St. Marks Bookshop, because of things like "ocular experience." Fucking narbos.
Notice how quite little East Village books manages to survive on used books alone, never once begging to be saved, and they're actually paying St. Marks rent.
Ugh, pretentious wankers. SMB are worse than the uppity, unable-to-alphabetize asshats at Strand, and that's really saying something.
quite s/b quiet
I agree that St Marks Books asking for handouts was really shady, and annoying, particularly when they had done such a poor job of keeping their shelves stocked with what contemporary book and periodical readers are looking for. It was actually depressing to shop there, even though I tried to give to support them.
But I don't understand why everyone is assuming this gut renovation cost more than any other gut renovation of a storefront done by any other contractor/architect/designer. This is a separate issue. If one is willing to work with a young architect/designer, quite often something like this can be done way cheaper and more stylishly than by the more typical established (boring) construction firms. I walk by here daily, and from the looks of the crew, it hardly looks like the glamorous/expensive/PR driven operation everyone assumes it to be.
"Architect speak" = inflated language of self-centered sociopaths. Sad that it seems to fit St Marks Books so well. It stimulated my reverse peristalsis experience, at least a little in my mouth.
"Lower runs are canted so as to tilt book spines towards eye level of the viewer."
I think this is a good idea.
I go back when they spun off from East Side because they didn't like the skuz of St. Mark's Place. So when Cooper Union invited them into their sparkling new space, it was a godsend from the jaws of funk. I never shopped there since because of that slight, but went in recently and loved their selection (because,really, there are no other places for theory, except Book Culture uptown). Though, as a bargain hunter, there were no markdowns.
I would suggest (are you listening managers?), now that they are back in the jowls of the EV (in First Houses, of all places), to drop the ocular, and get some decent remainders.
Seems like some common-sense design. It's always harder to see books at the lower-shelf levels, so the cantilever effect will help make those on lower shelves more easily viewable.
no matter where you build them curved shelves/walls are harder to build and cost more than straight ones.
this is not rocket science.
"Section titles are literally etched into the wood of the shelving"
I may be misunderstanding, but this doesn't seem like the best of ideas. Making category signage permanent parts of the fixtures would seem to limit future options regarding expanding categories, repositioning them around the store, enabling fluid merchandising, etc..
But the canted shelving seems a cool idea.
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