Cultivate it as you will... [Carnegie's South Pacific]

Scottish American industrialist Andrew Carnegie established 2,509 library buildings throughout the English-speaking world between 1886-1917. His charitable enterprise claimed to be an act of hands off gifting. "Cultivate it as you will..." Carnegie proclaimed. Upon moving to New Zealand, I was surprised to discover Carnegie libraries sprinkled throughout the South Pacific. As a child, I grew up checking out books from the Carnegie library in my industrial hometown of Duluth, Minnesota. The public library collection eventually outgrew the landmark building and it was turned into office space. As a teenagers, we frequented the library-turned-Planned-Parenthood to check out birth control. Eventually the building was abandoned and fell into disrepair. Cultivate it as you will… explores the legacy, evolution and devolution of the 23 Carnegie libraries erected in the South Pacific. Over a period of two years, I travelled to each of the remaining 16 buildings in New Zealand, Australia and Fiji to document their adaptive reuse. The result is contemplative reflection on one man's fraught legacy and the communities that fulfilled, or did not fulfill, Carnegie’s vision.