Rutherford Library’s new nature-themed stairwell is ridiculous

The new green stickers under the stairs of Rutherford North are another case of someone not stating the obvious at the board meeting.

I take the stairs in the library because I’m too impatient to wait for an elevator. After long days in the library agonizing over 10,000 pages of 18th-century literature, upcoming 12,000-word essays and the phenomenon of existence itself, the plain, unobtrusive stairwell is a nice place to relax and gather your thoughts. Before this year, the stairwell walls were an industrial white spotted with galaxies of little holes in the concrete. If one was to look carefully, it resembled the sparse works of Cy Twombly.

Now some pack of administrators bragging about their contribution to sustainability authorized sticking high-gloss, wall-size stickers with random nature pictures onto the walls. The most asinine addition to such bucolic redecoration is horizontal stickers glued to the underside of stairs which, embedded in pixelated images of grass, proclaim in white Helvetica font messages such as ‘Look at You Go!’, ‘Small Steps Make Big Differences’, and ‘Congratulations! You’re Halfway to the Top.’

This new decision will make every thinking person’s blood pressure surge. Such a loud, lurid presentation of patronizing messages are insulting to scholars, who assuredly, use both the library and the stairs the most of all library patrons. There’s an immediate sense of disgust upon knowing that someone (lest it was some fervent environmentalist unalienated from such labour) had to stupefyingly bend over and slide a sticker over every single one of the 120 or so stairs in the Rutherford North stairwell. I highly doubt whoever did the work was an accredited, salaried librarian.

Perhaps the most hilariously overlooked feature are the images of fresh-cut suburban-grade grass that some apparently thought was an appropriate symbol of virgin nature. Instead, as Timothy Morton points out, a “lawn… acts as an extension of the inside of the house.” A lawn is essentially a carpet. Second perhaps to national parks, the lawn is the foremost symbol of an artificial and manufactured sense of nature.

If the library wants to colour the stairwell, they should use art made by students instead of advertising banal environmental propaganda. If the library wants to decrease elevator use, they should appeal to the majority who aren’t so naive as to do exactly as signs say, and who aren’t prone to, you know, walk barefoot up the stairs to an Edenic paradise and feel as if they’re, little by little, offering every particle of being to Gaia while ensconced in a green vine blanket of mystified environmental arguments.

Such a decor could be some obscure campus joke like The Gateway’s Three Lines Free except that the library has a responsibility to the province by being the largest and most prestigious library in Alberta. Unless the weeds are pulled off the walls, Rutherford North will see significantly higher elevator use.