State Library Victoria

Walk inside and look up. The La Trobe Reading Room is one of the great interior spaces of the nineteenth century: an octagonal dome six storeys high, modelled on the British Museum in London and the Library of Congress in Washington. When it was built in nineteen thirteen, the enormous reinforced concrete dome was the largest of its kind in the world. It can house thirty-two thousand books and three hundred and twenty readers at its radially arranged desks.

But here is the unsettling part. The room was designed on a panopticon plan, the same layout used in prisons. A librarian sat on a raised dais at the exact centre of the room, from where they could survey every single desk without moving. Instead of a warden watching inmates, you had a librarian watching readers, ready to deliver stern admonishments to anyone who dared whisper. The architecture of surveillance, repurposed for silence.

The library itself opened in eighteen fifty-six, making it one of the oldest public libraries in the world and the oldest in Australia. It was designed by Joseph Reed, the same architect who designed the Royal Exhibition Building. The dome's skylights were covered with copper sheathing in nineteen fifty-nine and the reading room slowly deteriorated. When the dome was refurbished and reopened in two thousand and three, the skylights were revealed again and literary quotations were inscribed around the upper galleries. The restoration cost ninety million dollars. But here is the truly democratic thing about this building: it is completely free. Anyone can walk in, sit down, and read. No membership, no fees, no judgement. And Melburnians do, in their thousands, every single day. The chess players on the front lawn are practically permanent fixtures.