The New Jersey university, with Gehry Partners Llp., has embarked on a difficult task: to reinvent the library for an age when information largely takes on electronic rather than print form. Lewis, 74, chairman of auto insurer Progressive Corp. and a Princeton graduate, is a longtime Gehry champion. He gave $60 million (about Rs300 crore) for the project’s $74 million budget.
Multidiscipline design
One never expects a Gehry design to be a sober monument to scholarship. The Lewis library’s gregarious explosion of forms sits in a growing complex devoted to a broad range of sciences and related fields. It draws from them all.
The entrance is a butterfly-winged vestibule that opens to a great, angular fissure. High overhead, a jitterbugging skylight lights a pathway through the building. The library visibly pushes itself into the fissure in great serrated sheets of glass. It almost impales a separate pair of chunky wings, one appropriately capped by a roof in the profile of a prone question mark. They house teams that concern themselves with what is replacing print: information technology, new media, and computational science and engineering.
The passage is conceived as a cafe-table-dotted street, paved in honey-toned Spanish limestone. As many disciplines share the classrooms, library and a media lab, the street intends to promote collaboration and that Holy Grail of research: the casual hatching of a groundbreaking idea.
“Libraries are becoming more a space where people come to access data and also more of a study space, research space and to some extent, a social space,” says Gehry Partners’ Craig Webb, the library’s project designer, in a phone interview from Los Angeles.
Missing pages
But is the whole idea of a library itself obsolete as more students use the Internet for research? “Dorm life is too distracting,” says Dorothy Pearson, Princeton’s associate university librarian for administrative services, over the phone. Students go to the library to focus on their work, she says. But where are the books?
The stacks you’d expect in a building that houses collections as varied as astrophysics, biology and statistics have largely been restricted to a surprisingly small high-density storage space in the basement.
Though a few reference books and print journals can be found at the entrance, the library, signals its new role from the minute you step in.
Tree of knowledge
Its information desk—a canary yellow squiggle—invites consultation with librarians. Upstairs, students find three levels of glorious high-ceilinged, light-filled study space.
These rooms, as high as 20ft, are dominated by the jagged planes of glass visible on the exterior. They form bays that open to vistas across the campus, and contemplate Gehry’s spectacular roofscape. Hidden windows beautifully balance the light. These are the contemporary equivalents of the cathedral-style reading rooms that are the icons of Collegiate Gothic campuses everywhere.