Hasta La Ideas

My favorite thing about the iPad is having dozens of books in one place. Having grown up lugging my share of dead trees around, I’ll never not appreciate digital book storage and access.

This is especially true after coming across the Bookwheel, the rather massive sixteenth-century design for a mechanical book “server” that you see above. Designed by Agostino Ramelli, a military engineer who spent his professional career creating siege machinery, the more peace-minded Bookwheel was intended as a convenient way to reference multiple books. Heavy tomes didn’t need to be lugged from shelves, and they could be left open on the last page you’d read, unmolested by the rotations; Agostino’s design ensured each shelf remained at the same angle no matter the wheel’s position.

The device was reportedly never built, at least not in Ramelli’s era; but the design for it was revealed in his humbly-titled book The Various and Ingenious Machines of Captain Agostino Ramelli, printed in 1588. Interestingly enough, Ramelli’s designs have since been criticized as the work of an egomaniac; detractors claim his mechanisms were overly complicated, with extraneous convolutions added purely to demonstrate his mechanical prowess.

That didn’t stop Daniel Libeskind from creating a version of the Bookwheel for the 1986 Venice Architecture Biennale. Libeskind’s version, reverse-engineered from Ramelli’s image, was called the Reading Machine.

An interview with architect Hal Laessig, a former student of Libeskind’s who had helped with the Biennale installation, reveals it to be a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction endeavor.

First off, according to the interview, then-professor Libeskind pressed his Cranbrook students into building the machine for him. And apparently architecture students at Cranbrook weren’t taught about wood expansion back then:

…There were two guys who built the Reading Machine by themselves with no power tools, out of ash, which is an incredibly hard wood. I don’t know how they did it. They basically slept in the woodshop.

But when we got to Venice, the hot, humid air had swollen all the wood, so it wouldn’t turn. And the teeth on the gears would start snapping. So we had to sand all the parts down—for days—to get it to turn.

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