Borges served as director of the Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina in Buenos Aires from 1955–73, although he was blind nearly all those years. In 1961, during Borges’s directorship, the Italian-Argentine architect Clorindo Testa designed a new building for the library:
Exterior of the Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina. Photograph by Dante Marcola.
Testa’s Biblioteca, mired in bureaucracy, was not begun until 1971—near the end of Borges’s tenure—and was inaugurated in 1992, six years after Borges’s death. It is, moreover, more inelegant than anything Borges imagined:
Spiral staircase in the Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina. Photograph by Dante Marcola.
Contrast to this the symmetry and delicacy of the ceiling of old Biblioteca Nacional, in which Borges worked and which his vision would have been strong enough to see in the first years he worked there:
Ceiling of the old Biblioteca Nacional de la República Argentina. Photograph by gollmar.
As for Borges’s Library of Babel, the most accurate models strike me as these:
Tags: Jorge Luis Borges, Short stories
