The article mentions it in passing, but Oodi is an important stop for parents with babies. The third floor is quite often packed with strollers.
Sure you can hang out in any cafe, but I find it valuable to have a place like Oodi that's free, easy to access, and built with kids in mind. When taking the kids on trips in Helsinki, we often visit Oodi to eat lunch, just because it's so easy. Or the whole trip might be just to visit Oodi, eat, and grab a couple books. Of course the central location helps a lot.
The article summarizes the functional parts so well. What is very hard to communicate is the feeling of space, especially in the top floor with the books. It's sort of unique, and recommend a visit anyone traveling nearby.
I worked at the company that developed the software used to design the construction of Oodi (Trimble/ Tekla Structures). It's so awesome to walk through a building you know the tool you helped to build, helped to build :D
Kino Regina, the movie theater mentioned, is owned and operated by the Finnish Arts and Culture Agency and does not only show classics, but also a lot of contemporary movies of note, right up until recent releases. It has modern hi-grade digifilm equipment but is also equiped to show film from eg. 70mm and cinemascope formats. They also host concerts and seminars.
To me the actual book section of Oodi is not particularly interesting/inspiring/impressive. It's not bad, but it is pretty mundane and gets overshadowed by all the other stuff going on in the building.
Well, book collection of the particular library doesn't matter much nowadays since you can order a book online and it will be delivered to your closest library. So it's more like a public space.
> The bottom floor has a big area full of chess and go boards, and there were in fact a couple of people using them!
Very cheap, relatively benign, with light educational and recreational value.
Decent.
> and a built-in cinema, which shows classic movies for little money.
Some of it can have benign cultural value, some of it can have malign cultural value. A bit expensive. Could have limited it to more boring but educational movies and films, perhaps with a focus on edutainment friendly to young children. Why spend taxpayer money on enabling people to watch braindead, mindrotting zombie movies for free or cheap?
Bad and soulless, fire whoever was involved with this.
> professional digital working stations, with high-quality screens!
Expensive. Some educational potential, some startup potential, but will that be realized?
Serves some fields but not others. Did they take a look at demand and supply regarding society?
Vulnerable to theft, grift and corruption?
Too expensive, cheaper hardware would probably have made more sense, unless they can make a strong case for the expensive hardware.
> There’s a big number of recording studios and sound production studios, all of which you can rent!
Is there really a dearth of professional musicians in Finnish society? This seems focused on startups and budding professionals, but a much cheaper space with much cheaper instruments that could be given to children both young and old, where instruments can be cheaply replaced once the children breaks them, would have much higher educational and creative value.
Bad and soulless, fire everyone involved with this.
> Oh, and while we’re at it, why don’t we rent some instruments, as well? There’s full-time staff maintaining them.
Grift and corruption, fire everyone involved with this, go straight to prison, do not collect $200.
> There’s many small and big group rooms which you can rent, many of them in active use! I see group meetings, students working, and podcast interviews being recorded!
Genuinely great for students, not that expensive. Good.
> Wanna rent a kitchen and cook with your friends? Sure, you can do that here!
A bit expensive. For homeless people and grift. The library staff might end up discriminating against homeless people, or have extra grift. Could have been good if limited to educational usage for children and teenagers, with adult supervision.
Have fun with homeless people committing theft in the library.
Bad.
> You can also rent game rooms with modern video game consoles and VR gear, along with the games to play in them!
Bad, corrupt and expensive. Could have been used for some more meaningful purposes like education and startups. Like letting children and teenagers try VR gear and program software for it, and possibly get inspired for non-entertainment usage of VR such as remote healthcare.
If really insisting on mindrotting entertainment that people can do at home, then it could have been done much more cheaply.
Fire everyone involved with it.
> There’s a makerspace: It has several 3D printers, multiple laser cutters, and engravers. And staff which can help you learn how to use them.
Expensive. Could be great regarding startups and education. Did they analyze needs for society, or did they do it due to it being trendy? Probably still good.
This is the future of libraries, and it sucks. Austin's downtown Central Library is like this. It sucks. They are not places for reaching the future.
Previously:
> So many environments nowadays, even the ones that are ostensibly created to fulfill this sort of thing, are just total failures at actually providing them. I'm thinking of things like public libraries. I live in Austin and have a major axe to grind about the public libraries here, which are nothing like what you'd get if you were actually interested in the pro-social goals that you'd think a public library would have in its charter. A teenager looking to escape their high-risk environment or an adult who's had their feet knocked out from beneath them basically stands no chance at getting out of their predicament if their only option were to use the public libraries here, which would unfortunately act more like a vortex to ensure they stay in the suck. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42323264>
The photos and breathless wonderment showcase it all, as well as this choice line from the slide at the top of this post: "Oodi is our common living room". These are not quiet places to study or get (back) on your feet.
These are non-commercial substitutes for the shopping malls of yestercentury first, egoistic art pieces and boondoggle for administrative make-work second, and well-intentioned but poorly thought out and executed public resources at a very, very, very, very, very distant third.
Why would somebody wanting to escape a high-risk environment, or some knocked-over adult go to a library?
It's great that libraries exist, be they in Austin, or here in Finland, but they're not where you get support when falling on hard times , or needing active support and assistance from your council/government/city/region. A library is not a walk-in rescue center, and nor should it be.
Oodi is a pretty space, it has nice facilities, although a surprisingly small stock of books. That said you can order books to collect them there, and Helsinki has no shortage of "real libraries". I think Oodi as a showcase, and a random mishmash of services and facilities is pretty good though. I went almost weekly with my youngest child for a few years, and have fond memories of the people I talked to, and the soft-play area.
> Why would somebody wanting to escape a high-risk environment, or some knocked-over adult go to a library?
… is this a joke? Regardless of the bizarre mental place from which only such a bizarre question can arise[1], the answer to the question can be found on the other end of the link I included—not that it should even have to be spelled out: "Researchers determined risk by asking lots of questions. For example, they asked whether the kid has basic necessities, like electricity or a quiet place to study."
* * * * *
> A library is not a walk-in rescue center, and nor should it be.
Right. Exactly. It's a library. It should be a library—one able to provide (and that does provide) the things that you should be able to count on a library to provide—and that few other places can if that's what you need. Not a cacophonous community center concerned foremost with providing photo ops for bougie normies living in relative comfort to post on Instagram during their disruptive stroll through. That's the _entire_ basis of my position and the premise of the multiple comments I wrote about this.
I sympathize with what you're saying. The "classic" library provides something that no other public spaces do.
But its worth mentioning that there are fewer and fewer "other public spaces." My local library is just that, a library, and that means I can't:
1. Eat in it, perhaps while studying.
2. Talk above a whisper.
3. Rent anything but books that I might want/need.
4. Do anything on a computer but be on the internet (the computers run a locked down version of Windows XP)
That's not a "problem" exactly. This library is doing exactly what a library is supposed to do. But my town has one other "public" space, which is a combined community and senior center. That's not good for much outside of chair yoga for a kid in a high risk environment; it's largely designed for adults.
It's nice that my library is "just a library" because I don't need it to be anything else. But the fact is that the library is one of the few open, walk-in, free public spaces left. It being "just a library" in that case seems like a missed opportunity.
Ah yes, the bizarre mental place of being a european and having a social net that extends past public libraries, a strange condition indeed.
Helsinki still has classic public libraries, so kids wanting to study in peace can still do that plus having the opportunity to meet people and engage in other activities that might be difficult at home, like practicing an instrument.
The notion that a knocked-over person is best supported by a library sounds quite strange from my perspective. A person struggling needs first and foremost to shelter, food and access to hygiene. Libraries do not provide any of that. They do provide a quite place to think and work and access to public information with newspapers and internet access, but a good shelter and a smartphone provide this too.
I think Finland (and many other countries) provide enough support to relieve Libraries of being a first address for struggling people, while still maintaining these libraries for what they are really needed. Oodi and similar projects existing does not take that away and I'm surprised you think it does.
> The notion that a knocked-over person is best supported by a library sounds quite strange from my perspective. A person struggling needs first and foremost to shelter, food and access to hygiene. Libraries do not provide any of that.
> Finland (and many other countries) provide enough support to relieve Libraries of being a first address for struggling people
Could you stop doing this, please? You are confabulating. I literally did not say any of the things that you're describing here. Not only did I not say it, I didn't even say anything like it. So… stop, please?
What I have done, by now, is to have made it abundantly, excruciatingly clear that I'm talking only about libraries providing the things that a library should provide, and nothing more. (And that it is, in fact, the position of those in support of e.g. Oodi who, perversely, are the ones suggesting that these libraries should be more—though you clearly don't appreciate this contradiction.)
> a good shelter and a smartphone provide this too
No. Absolutely not.
You don't understand, and that's great—you don't have to understand. And it's not a European versus American thing that's the root of the problem here. (There's no shortage of Americans who would fall into the same camp as you. That would be the expected outcome if I were to call upon any man- or woman-on-the-street and have this discussion.) It's a failure of empathy—true empathy—of the sort that requires being able to really think through everything involved in a counterfactual before staking a position about what would or wouldn't be sufficient in some hypothetical that's so far removed the present moment that you're acquainted with. And that's how societies get future libraries like the ones we're talking about.
There are a lot of Americans who know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich given the basic ingredients/tools. There are a lot of Americans who, when asked, would probably tell you with great confidence that they could for sure explain all of the steps involved in making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with those ingredients. There are far, far, far fewer Americans than that who could actually provide an explanation, sans errors/mistakes.
As a Helsinki resident, I agree with much of what you say about Oodi. And in spite of the other commenter claiming "everyone" loves it, I don't nor do many of my peers of an intellectual bent, mad about books. This building only disappoints us.
But here is the thing: in Finland academic libraries are open to the general public. Someone wanting to immerse themselves in actual books, or work in silence, have a wealth of options in downtown Helsinki: the University of Helsinki main library, the Finnish National Library, the Finnish Literature Society's library, the Research Institute for Languages of Finland's library, and more. So, if Oodi ended up being a plain old social third space instead of a "real library", that didn't take anything away from Helsinki residents.
> that didn't take anything away from Helsinki residents
That's the real problem I have with the false promises of places like Austin's Central Library and other Oodi-likes.
The biggest threat to libraries and the social goods they're ostensibly designed to produce are not really the people trying to tear them down to tighten budgets. It's way more pernicious than that:
The biggest threat is the people trying to tear them down and replace them with places like this.
Nah, I might be a hermit and misanthrope who prefers books to people and hates crotch goblins running around, but I can still see the value for general society of a third space open to everyone, young and old. Especially when many people are hurting these days from lack of IRL contact, and the alternative would be expensive for-pay locations like coffee joints or pubs.
Austin Central Library has a 4.7/5.0 on 1,464 reviews on Google Maps. Of course, this is a biased sample. But, I think it's safe to say lots of people love it.
The article mentions it in passing, but Oodi is an important stop for parents with babies. The third floor is quite often packed with strollers.
Sure you can hang out in any cafe, but I find it valuable to have a place like Oodi that's free, easy to access, and built with kids in mind. When taking the kids on trips in Helsinki, we often visit Oodi to eat lunch, just because it's so easy. Or the whole trip might be just to visit Oodi, eat, and grab a couple books. Of course the central location helps a lot.
Really nice building and space.
The article summarizes the functional parts so well. What is very hard to communicate is the feeling of space, especially in the top floor with the books. It's sort of unique, and recommend a visit anyone traveling nearby.
I worked at the company that developed the software used to design the construction of Oodi (Trimble/ Tekla Structures). It's so awesome to walk through a building you know the tool you helped to build, helped to build :D
Kino Regina, the movie theater mentioned, is owned and operated by the Finnish Arts and Culture Agency and does not only show classics, but also a lot of contemporary movies of note, right up until recent releases. It has modern hi-grade digifilm equipment but is also equiped to show film from eg. 70mm and cinemascope formats. They also host concerts and seminars.
To me the actual book section of Oodi is not particularly interesting/inspiring/impressive. It's not bad, but it is pretty mundane and gets overshadowed by all the other stuff going on in the building.
Famously the actual main library at Pasila has a much larger book collection. Oodi is more of a community space / show piece.
Fair, but it is part of a pretty large library system and you can order whatever you want to pickup at Oodi
Well, book collection of the particular library doesn't matter much nowadays since you can order a book online and it will be delivered to your closest library. So it's more like a public space.
Oodi was noted in the media to be particularly unimpressive when it came to actually having books back when it opened.
https://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/art-2000005933560.html
I live nearby and really enjoy Oodi. It's usually much busier than in these pictures.
It's awful as a library, mediocre as an event space and not really good as a hacker space.
It's beautiful, though, but that's about it.
t. a Finn
> The bottom floor has a big area full of chess and go boards, and there were in fact a couple of people using them!
Very cheap, relatively benign, with light educational and recreational value.
Decent.
> and a built-in cinema, which shows classic movies for little money.
Some of it can have benign cultural value, some of it can have malign cultural value. A bit expensive. Could have limited it to more boring but educational movies and films, perhaps with a focus on edutainment friendly to young children. Why spend taxpayer money on enabling people to watch braindead, mindrotting zombie movies for free or cheap?
Bad and soulless, fire whoever was involved with this.
> professional digital working stations, with high-quality screens!
Expensive. Some educational potential, some startup potential, but will that be realized?
Serves some fields but not others. Did they take a look at demand and supply regarding society?
Vulnerable to theft, grift and corruption?
Too expensive, cheaper hardware would probably have made more sense, unless they can make a strong case for the expensive hardware.
> There’s a big number of recording studios and sound production studios, all of which you can rent!
Is there really a dearth of professional musicians in Finnish society? This seems focused on startups and budding professionals, but a much cheaper space with much cheaper instruments that could be given to children both young and old, where instruments can be cheaply replaced once the children breaks them, would have much higher educational and creative value.
Bad and soulless, fire everyone involved with this.
> Oh, and while we’re at it, why don’t we rent some instruments, as well? There’s full-time staff maintaining them.
Grift and corruption, fire everyone involved with this, go straight to prison, do not collect $200.
> There’s many small and big group rooms which you can rent, many of them in active use! I see group meetings, students working, and podcast interviews being recorded!
Genuinely great for students, not that expensive. Good.
> Wanna rent a kitchen and cook with your friends? Sure, you can do that here!
A bit expensive. For homeless people and grift. The library staff might end up discriminating against homeless people, or have extra grift. Could have been good if limited to educational usage for children and teenagers, with adult supervision.
Have fun with homeless people committing theft in the library.
Bad.
> You can also rent game rooms with modern video game consoles and VR gear, along with the games to play in them!
Bad, corrupt and expensive. Could have been used for some more meaningful purposes like education and startups. Like letting children and teenagers try VR gear and program software for it, and possibly get inspired for non-entertainment usage of VR such as remote healthcare.
If really insisting on mindrotting entertainment that people can do at home, then it could have been done much more cheaply.
Fire everyone involved with it.
> There’s a makerspace: It has several 3D printers, multiple laser cutters, and engravers. And staff which can help you learn how to use them.
> Sewing machines! Shirt presses! Cutting plotters!
Expensive. Could be great regarding startups and education. Did they analyze needs for society, or did they do it due to it being trendy? Probably still good.
>Have fun with homeless people committing theft in the library.
Oh yeah.
In Finland, the country notoriously famous for its unmanageable homelessness problem.
Get a reality check, my friend.
It almost reads as you were not a fan.
Corrupt and soulless people will downvote this.
This is the future of libraries, and it sucks. Austin's downtown Central Library is like this. It sucks. They are not places for reaching the future.
Previously:
> So many environments nowadays, even the ones that are ostensibly created to fulfill this sort of thing, are just total failures at actually providing them. I'm thinking of things like public libraries. I live in Austin and have a major axe to grind about the public libraries here, which are nothing like what you'd get if you were actually interested in the pro-social goals that you'd think a public library would have in its charter. A teenager looking to escape their high-risk environment or an adult who's had their feet knocked out from beneath them basically stands no chance at getting out of their predicament if their only option were to use the public libraries here, which would unfortunately act more like a vortex to ensure they stay in the suck. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42323264>
The photos and breathless wonderment showcase it all, as well as this choice line from the slide at the top of this post: "Oodi is our common living room". These are not quiet places to study or get (back) on your feet.
These are non-commercial substitutes for the shopping malls of yestercentury first, egoistic art pieces and boondoggle for administrative make-work second, and well-intentioned but poorly thought out and executed public resources at a very, very, very, very, very distant third.
Why would somebody wanting to escape a high-risk environment, or some knocked-over adult go to a library?
It's great that libraries exist, be they in Austin, or here in Finland, but they're not where you get support when falling on hard times , or needing active support and assistance from your council/government/city/region. A library is not a walk-in rescue center, and nor should it be.
Oodi is a pretty space, it has nice facilities, although a surprisingly small stock of books. That said you can order books to collect them there, and Helsinki has no shortage of "real libraries". I think Oodi as a showcase, and a random mishmash of services and facilities is pretty good though. I went almost weekly with my youngest child for a few years, and have fond memories of the people I talked to, and the soft-play area.
> Why would somebody wanting to escape a high-risk environment, or some knocked-over adult go to a library?
… is this a joke? Regardless of the bizarre mental place from which only such a bizarre question can arise[1], the answer to the question can be found on the other end of the link I included—not that it should even have to be spelled out: "Researchers determined risk by asking lots of questions. For example, they asked whether the kid has basic necessities, like electricity or a quiet place to study."
* * * * *
> A library is not a walk-in rescue center, and nor should it be.
Right. Exactly. It's a library. It should be a library—one able to provide (and that does provide) the things that you should be able to count on a library to provide—and that few other places can if that's what you need. Not a cacophonous community center concerned foremost with providing photo ops for bougie normies living in relative comfort to post on Instagram during their disruptive stroll through. That's the _entire_ basis of my position and the premise of the multiple comments I wrote about this.
1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40136743#:~:text=I%20ca...>
I sympathize with what you're saying. The "classic" library provides something that no other public spaces do.
But its worth mentioning that there are fewer and fewer "other public spaces." My local library is just that, a library, and that means I can't:
1. Eat in it, perhaps while studying. 2. Talk above a whisper. 3. Rent anything but books that I might want/need. 4. Do anything on a computer but be on the internet (the computers run a locked down version of Windows XP)
That's not a "problem" exactly. This library is doing exactly what a library is supposed to do. But my town has one other "public" space, which is a combined community and senior center. That's not good for much outside of chair yoga for a kid in a high risk environment; it's largely designed for adults.
It's nice that my library is "just a library" because I don't need it to be anything else. But the fact is that the library is one of the few open, walk-in, free public spaces left. It being "just a library" in that case seems like a missed opportunity.
Ah yes, the bizarre mental place of being a european and having a social net that extends past public libraries, a strange condition indeed.
Helsinki still has classic public libraries, so kids wanting to study in peace can still do that plus having the opportunity to meet people and engage in other activities that might be difficult at home, like practicing an instrument.
The notion that a knocked-over person is best supported by a library sounds quite strange from my perspective. A person struggling needs first and foremost to shelter, food and access to hygiene. Libraries do not provide any of that. They do provide a quite place to think and work and access to public information with newspapers and internet access, but a good shelter and a smartphone provide this too.
I think Finland (and many other countries) provide enough support to relieve Libraries of being a first address for struggling people, while still maintaining these libraries for what they are really needed. Oodi and similar projects existing does not take that away and I'm surprised you think it does.
> The notion that a knocked-over person is best supported by a library sounds quite strange from my perspective. A person struggling needs first and foremost to shelter, food and access to hygiene. Libraries do not provide any of that.
> Finland (and many other countries) provide enough support to relieve Libraries of being a first address for struggling people
Could you stop doing this, please? You are confabulating. I literally did not say any of the things that you're describing here. Not only did I not say it, I didn't even say anything like it. So… stop, please?
What I have done, by now, is to have made it abundantly, excruciatingly clear that I'm talking only about libraries providing the things that a library should provide, and nothing more. (And that it is, in fact, the position of those in support of e.g. Oodi who, perversely, are the ones suggesting that these libraries should be more—though you clearly don't appreciate this contradiction.)
> a good shelter and a smartphone provide this too
No. Absolutely not.
You don't understand, and that's great—you don't have to understand. And it's not a European versus American thing that's the root of the problem here. (There's no shortage of Americans who would fall into the same camp as you. That would be the expected outcome if I were to call upon any man- or woman-on-the-street and have this discussion.) It's a failure of empathy—true empathy—of the sort that requires being able to really think through everything involved in a counterfactual before staking a position about what would or wouldn't be sufficient in some hypothetical that's so far removed the present moment that you're acquainted with. And that's how societies get future libraries like the ones we're talking about.
There are a lot of Americans who know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich given the basic ingredients/tools. There are a lot of Americans who, when asked, would probably tell you with great confidence that they could for sure explain all of the steps involved in making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with those ingredients. There are far, far, far fewer Americans than that who could actually provide an explanation, sans errors/mistakes.
As a Helsinki resident, I agree with much of what you say about Oodi. And in spite of the other commenter claiming "everyone" loves it, I don't nor do many of my peers of an intellectual bent, mad about books. This building only disappoints us.
But here is the thing: in Finland academic libraries are open to the general public. Someone wanting to immerse themselves in actual books, or work in silence, have a wealth of options in downtown Helsinki: the University of Helsinki main library, the Finnish National Library, the Finnish Literature Society's library, the Research Institute for Languages of Finland's library, and more. So, if Oodi ended up being a plain old social third space instead of a "real library", that didn't take anything away from Helsinki residents.
> that didn't take anything away from Helsinki residents
That's the real problem I have with the false promises of places like Austin's Central Library and other Oodi-likes.
The biggest threat to libraries and the social goods they're ostensibly designed to produce are not really the people trying to tear them down to tighten budgets. It's way more pernicious than that:
The biggest threat is the people trying to tear them down and replace them with places like this.
> So, if Oodi ended up being a plain old social third space instead of a "real library", that didn't take anything away from Helsinki residents.
Taxes and corruption.
Nah, I might be a hermit and misanthrope who prefers books to people and hates crotch goblins running around, but I can still see the value for general society of a third space open to everyone, young and old. Especially when many people are hurting these days from lack of IRL contact, and the alternative would be expensive for-pay locations like coffee joints or pubs.
I mostly agree with you.
I find Oodi (and Sello after redesign) to feel like a typical open office space (rather than mall) but definitely not like a proper library.
Rikhardinkatu is what I'd expect library to be while Lippulaiva is rather nice for a library that's part of a mall.
Happily, Helsinkians don't agree. Everyone seems to love Oodi.
It would "seem" that "everyone" loves Austin's downtown Central Library. Reality: they don't.
There's nothing "everyone" loves.
Austin Central Library has a 4.7/5.0 on 1,464 reviews on Google Maps. Of course, this is a biased sample. But, I think it's safe to say lots of people love it.