Philanthropy and Light

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie supported the erection of almost three thousand public buildings across Britain and America. Seeking to gauge the extent of universal values, this book concentrates on the design and performance of a handful of early Carnegie library buildings in Britain and America, identifying their response to contemporary design theory, but also by contrast to their respective local environmental contexts. It also looks more broadly at the twentieth-century legacy of shared international environmental standards for public spaces in general.