Description

A distinct composition of steel, glass, brick and stucco on 8,082 m², the Lewis Library is Princeton University’s library of science and research, consolidating several departmental libraries previously spread across campus. With this plan, six librarians and 14 administrative support staff relocated from their respective libraries to establish a joint presence at Lewis Library. This strategy of integration allows for greater efficiency in managing resources, information and services.

Of equal importance, the new program also includes the Office of Information Technology’s Education Technologies Center and New Media Center, a new Broadcast Center, operated by the Office of Information Technology (OIT) and the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering, and OIT’s computational science and engineering support group. The New Media Center will more than double its previous floor space for workstations that support software and hardware for creating and manipulating digital objects. These spaces will be dedicated to visualization technology that will aid researchers in rendering, analyzing and displaying their data.

These planning strategies provide a raison d’être for Gehry’s undefined architectural forms. At the Lewis Library, they divide into approximately three dissimilar masses; a two-story wing and a four-story tower housing the collection and a three-story wing accommodating the Education Technologies Center, New Media Center and the computational science and engineering support groups. Gehry claims that the massing (involving 40 tonnes of embossed stainless steel, 562 tonnes of clay for bricks, 2,415 m² glass and 1,022 m² of stucco) is “a sculptural body-language” that is contextual with Princeton’s signature Gothic campus. In Gehry style, these exterior sculptural forms result in clashing shapes and geometry that are irregular and constructed only through the programming platform, CATIA (Computer Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application). While students enjoy the intrigue of the jarring shapes and bold colors, they have difficulty navigating the library itself. Similarly, book stacks are located primarily below ground where an orthogonal space is possible. The geometry, however, has created some interesting interior spaces that include the skylit entry atrium formed by the intersection of different materials, a star-shaped drywall opening between two levels, and a 10.3 m high glass-enclosed reading room nicknamed “The Tree House”.

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Originally published in: Nolan Lushington, Wolfgang Rudorf, Liliane Wong, Libraries: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2016.