The library wasn’t his biggest project, but he was exhilarated by it. He approached it with a kind of freedom he had never experienced before. He believed that its design could fuse everything he had learned and loved in the visual world into a monument to things he valued most: history, books, philosophy, design, aspiration, creativity. He began sketching, with the idea of combining the fancifulness of Spanish Revival with a more modern silhouette. Thematically, he imagined the building as a tribute to the glories of knowledge—in effect, it would be a humanist cathedral celebrating the great
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