You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  The design is often described by architects and architecture critics as if it were a simple series of concentric rings, with a central area containing the full-height atrium, a middle section (largely protected from the direct sun) which houses the stacks, and an outer ring in which the carrels and reading rooms are bathed in natural light from the exterior windows. This is true enough as far as it goes, but it doesn’t begin to convey the complicated feel of the space. For someone actually moving through the library, it is not easy to distinguish among the three rings. The division is blurred, for instance, by the narrower mezzanine levels that hang, balcony-like, above each full floor, containing their own rows of carrels set well back from the library’s exterior wall. Sunlight reaches both sets of carrels, inner and outer, through the big rectangular windows that pierce the library’s brick skin on all sides; it reaches the center of the building not only through the high clerestory windows, but also through two large side windows on the atrium level; it even reaches the ground-floor reading room through floor-to-ceiling windows that face out toward the arcade on multiple sides.

  The effect of this pervasive natural light, in combination with each floor’s orientation toward the inner atrium, is to create a sense of unity throughout the building, without any kind of artificial divisions among functional rings or bands. At the same time, the local design on every floor is different. The fourth and highest floor has seminar rooms off corridors on two adjoining sides of the square, and sumptuous reading rooms with sharply slanted ceilings on the other two. The third floor has a sitting area with a triple-sided fireplace on one side only, with the usual stacks-and-carrels arrangement on the other three sides. There is a staff room on one side of the lowest mezzanine level and a row of offices on the adjoining side, but there is no third or fourth side on that level: on those “empty” sides, the staircase simply offers a view of the atrium through an interior window, rather than access to any space.

  Confusion is the least of the terrors this building is capable of producing. If you go up to the highest floor, you will find four small windows opening mysteriously out of an internal corridor, with each pair overlooking a corner at which the massive concrete X joins the wall. These windows have no glass—they are open to the atrium—and if you stick your head through them, you will see a vertigo-inducing slice of the atrium floor, cut off at a severe angle by the heavy block of concrete, which seems to hang in the air in front of you. You are only four stories up, but they are tall stories, and something about the abbreviated view combined with the open window frame makes the ground feel slippery beneath your feet. Even more likely to send a chill through you is the unimpeded Escher-like view from the top of the “back” staircase all the way down to the bottom. And for those hardy souls with no fear of heights, there is the top-floor arcade, which runs all around the building. Here the square, open window spaces sit above head-high brick walls pierced by five-inch-wide vertical slits—slits of the sort that medieval knights might have shot arrows through—and these wide cracks run all the way down to the brick paving of the terrace floor. If you were so inclined, you could easily stick a limb through one of the slits; alternatively, you could, with some effort, climb to the top of the relatively low brick wall. Perhaps it was some such inclination on the part of past Exeter students that resulted in the decision to keep the doors leading out to the arcade permanently locked.

  A strong feeling of security combined with the thrill of fear: how many modern structures manage to engender them both? And these are not the only contradictions embodied in the Exeter Library. The sense of symmetry is overwhelming, but the use of asymmetry is equally important in the design. You can easily lose yourself in this building, and yet you can always find out where you are by orienting yourself toward the atrium. The materials—Kahn’s usual concrete and wood—may be mundane, but the finish on them is beautiful, and the way they fit together supremely elegant. Opposition plays with complementarity, as the enormous circular cutout nestles within its square, the triangles of oak paneling set themselves off next to the polyhedrons of concrete, and the grand curve of the highly visible travertine staircase contrasts with the sharper-edged, more functional design of the enclosed, steel-railed, slate-paved corner stairs. The whole building is like a puzzle that asks you to fit its odd pieces together, whether these are the angular shapes of wood and concrete meeting at a shadow joint, or the overarching and mysterious mismatch between interior and exterior views. There is always something new to be discovered here: that is the main thing this library appears to be saying.

  Some of the discoveries, though important, may remain at the unconscious level. For instance, a great deal of the pleasure one gains from that central atrium has to do with the perfect proportions of the space. The relation of the length of each side of the square floor to the room’s overall height turns out to be exactly 1:1.618, the ratio known as the “golden section” or the “golden mean” in Greek mathematics. The same pleasing ratio governs the relationship between the diameter of the massive circular cutouts and the height of the rectangular planes in which they are embedded. Outside, the building manifests a similar obsession with precise measurement, for as the stories rise, the brick columns framing the windows narrow by exactly one brick’s width at each successive level, and the windows widen accordingly. None of this is instantly visible to the casual or even the serious glance, and yet it all has an effect: one feels the grace of the design intuitively even if one can’t measure it. At Exeter, geometry has truly triumphed in Kahn’s work, as Anne Tyng always hoped it would, but it has done so in part by effacing itself—or rather, by merging its hard, abstract shapes into the softer lineaments of human wishes, desires, and fears.

  * * *

  That Louis Kahn could so beautifully fulfill this particular commission was never a given. Even at its last and most highly developed stage, his architectural career had its failures, and one of them sits immediately behind and beside the library building. If the Exeter Library is one of Kahn’s finest constructions, the Exeter Dining Hall—designed and built at exactly the same time—is surely one of his worst.

  The students call it the Crematorium, after the towering brick chimneys that surround it on all sides. Like the library, the dining hall has an exterior composed mainly of brick and glass, and it too is a distinctly modern building, but all similarity ends there. Though substantial windows light either side of the bifurcated dining room, the overall atmosphere is one of gloom and oppression. A noticeably slanted ceiling rises to a high peak in the center, but the space nonetheless seems squashed and horizontal, as if something heavy were bearing down overhead. The acoustics are so noisy that one can barely hear oneself, much less one’s dining companions, and the traffic patterns from entrance to food lines to tables to tray returns are so nonsensical and confused that people are always banging into each other. It is a deeply unpleasant environment, and no one chooses to spend more time there than necessary.

  Various theories have been offered as to why the dining hall is so inferior to the library. One line is that Louis Kahn left the design and construction almost entirely in the hands of his novice project architect, a recent addition to his firm. Another is that during this period he was extremely busy with the “Second Capital” in Dacca, East Pakistan, a massive project begun in 1963, and so had little time left over to focus on anything else. But neither of these explains why the library, which was supervised by the same project architect during the same busy period, turned out splendidly. The responsibilities for the dining hall’s insufficiencies cannot be sloughed off so easily, for although Kahn routinely delegated many tasks to his employees, he prided himself on being a one-man firm, and no plans left his office without his approval.

  The fact is, Lou did not care much about food. Cooking was a necessity in his eyes, not a source of intense delight or serious pleasure, and as a result he never gave a great deal of thought to it. He may have enjoyed his meals as much as the next man, but he was singularly
incurious about how they were produced. You can see this in the kitchens he designed for his private houses, which for the most part are cramped quarters tucked away from the primary social activity. (Even the notable exceptions prove the rule: the charming kitchen at Esherick House was designed by the client’s artist uncle, Wharton Esherick, and not by Kahn; and the lovely, glass-walled, brick-floored kitchen-dining area at Korman House was the result of emphatic instructions on the part of the clients.)

  Louis Kahn did, however, love books, and he viscerally enjoyed being among them, whether in bookstores, libraries, grand palaces, ancient monasteries, or his own office. “He loved used bookstores,” said Jack MacAllister, recalling Lou’s trips to La Jolla when they were working on the Salk Institute together. “He insisted on being taken to a used bookstore in San Diego, sometimes even missing meetings to go there. He’d buy a book and tell you he’d read it. Actually, he’d open it in the middle and read one page and say, ‘This is what the book’s about.’”

  Lou’s own take on his reading habits confirmed this story. “I like English history, I have volumes of it,” he said, “but I never read anything but the first volume, and even at that, only the first three or four chapters. And of course my only real purpose is to read Volume Zero.” Treasuring the origins of things meant that he necessarily had a somewhat ambivalent relationship to books, for in some ways he was always trying to get back to the point before anything was written down. When, as part of the Berkeley creativity study, he took a test called Consequences that asked him (among other things) to come up with multiple responses to the question “What would happen if all books were suddenly destroyed?” his answers were surprisingly upbeat: “We would look for fundamentals.” “We would see things in wonder.” “We would hear things for the first time.” “The mind would improve.” But he also acknowledged, mischievously: “We would start writing them all over again.” Books, despite his ambivalences, were an essential part of his idea of human existence.

  This meant that when he was asked to design a library, as opposed to a dining hall, he was able to dig down into his own character, his own way of occupying the world. “You plan a library as though no library ever existed,” he said, and this search for beginnings is what ultimately allowed him to come up with something remarkable. First principles came before any specific design. “A man with a book goes to the light. A library begins that way,” he remarked. After seeing the carrels in medieval monasteries, he also formulated such notions as “the carrel is the room within a room” and “the carrel is the niche which could be the beginning.” Out of such observations grew the design for Exeter Library’s glorious wooden carrels, those light-filled, comfortably private, semi-enclosed desks that ring the building on all four sides and on several levels. But the carrels were not the only parts of the library that needed natural light. “I see a library as a place where the librarian can lay out the books, open especially to selected pages to seduce the readers,” he said. “There should be a place with great tables on which the librarian can put the books, and the readers should be able to take the books and go to the light.” Hence the profuse and welcome sunlight flooding into the atrium, pouring into the top-floor reading rooms, and even shining into the ground-floor periodicals room. The whole of Exeter Library is meant to be a place where one can take a book and go to the light—where one can be seduced into reading for pleasure.

  * * *

  A great deal has altered, in the school itself and in the world beyond, since Louis Kahn finished the Exeter Library in 1972. Once a school for boys, Exeter has become coeducational. This has no doubt had many consequences, but on a practical level it has meant that half the library restrooms, the ones on alternating floors, had to be allocated to girls. Laptop computers and the Internet became a commonplace element in education, so the library needed to be wired for wireless, leaving a small visible extrusion—an odd gray disk attached to one of the atrium’s pillars—in a place Kahn would have left bare. Card catalogues are, as everywhere, a thing of the past. Exeter has kept its lovely wooden catalogue cases (which, like virtually all the woodwork in the library, were designed by Kahn himself), but they are now merely a decorative element, a visual shield between the main part of the atrium and the new computer room. The library will never run out of stack space, not so much because of wise planning, but because fewer and fewer bound books are acquired for the stacks as more and more texts become electronic. And with the advent of recent technology, one no longer has to carry a book to the light to read it, for the screen itself is backlit.

  None of this could have been foreseen by the architect, and yet the building he designed is as useful and important as it ever was. It is still a central feature of the Exeter campus, not just for the librarians who work there, but for the faculty and students and even townspeople who come there regularly. Concerts and public events are held in the atrium, and at such moments the library feels like one big room, with the sound reaching up to the highest levels. At various times of the day or evening, individual students can be found occupying whole tables in luxurious solitude in one of the special-collections rooms on the fourth floor, while other students lounge on sofas, quietly conferring, or study at their assigned carrels. Occasional oddities occur, such as a spontaneous performance amid the stacks by students in the dance program. A small-group sleepover once took place, supervised by the current head librarian, Gail Scanlon. “It was eerie,” she said. “You heard different sounds at night. But it wasn’t scary. It was comforting, because there’s that middle ring where all the books are—it was kind of like arms around you.”

  Scanlon has her complaints about the physical plant. The heating and air-conditioning system is inadequate, so it is often too cold or too hot. Cracked pipes located deep within the walls sometimes leak a sewage smell. The windows don’t open. Lightbulbs and vents on or near the high ceilings are almost impossible to reach. The fireplace in her office, though enticing, can’t be lit without releasing smoke into other rooms. But the library, she feels, is nonetheless a remarkable place. “The space is beautiful. The light is gorgeous,” she comments. She’s also pleasantly surprised by the different kinds of spaces one finds here. “There’s almost a sense of formality or seriousness as the floors increase,” Scanlon remarks. “The ground level is the most vibrant floor: newspapers, plasma screen, events with food, exhibits.” On the atrium floor—the floor containing her office—are the service desk, the card catalogues and computers, several comfortable chairs, a couple of marble benches with views out the front windows, a grand piano, and a large oval table perched on a Persian carpet. Then, “as you go up higher in the stacks, it’s quieter, more about the work: individuals rather than groups. At the top floor, with the special collections, it’s more a hushed space.” And at every point one is not only aware of the specific nature of the interior space; there is also a constant sense of the outdoors. “The light changes. The fall is just gorgeous,” Scanlon says. And in the winter, “when it starts to snow, you can hear people run to the windows. When there’s a bad storm, it echoes upstairs. You are always aware of what’s outside.”

  Gail Scanlon has been at Exeter for only a few years, but one of her fellow librarians, Drew Gatto, has been working there for over a decade, and his connection to the building and its architect feels unusually intimate. “I really think he had the students in mind, spiritually, when he designed the carrels,” Gatto says. “Louis Kahn understood light like no other architect.” He goes on to tell a little anecdote from his own experience: “I remember one time, late May or June, I was up on the third floor shelving books. The light was coming through the windows by the carrels. And all of a sudden I got this impression that I was being bathed in light; it seemed like there was a beam of light coming in and hitting me and nothing else. It was very”—he pauses for a long time, as if the feeling he recalls is impossible to describe properly—“pleasant.”

  Gatto has clearly thought a lot about the space in which he works
. He talks about “finding beauty and symmetry in something utilitarian rather than artistic”—a notion that would have pleased the architect, who often disparaged “so-called beauty” and insisted that “No space is a space which does not show how it was made.” Gatto comments on the heaviness of the building materials, and the way the light itself offsets them. He also points out how “those open circles soften the building, because predominantly it’s a square building.” In this too he seems in tune with the architect, who was fond of remarking that “the wall does not want an opening, it resents an opening. When you make an opening, it cries. When you make it really well, it feels all right.”

  The panopticon structure of the library, with all those well-made openings, is bound to emphasize the process of seeing and being seen, and Gatto imagines that new students might feel a bit intimidated as they ascend the grand travertine staircase. “It’s impossible not to feel you’re being watched when you come up those stairs,” he points out. “All the knowledge looking back at you, the people watching you: it’s imposing in the same way the school is imposing.” Asked how he feels about those vertiginous open windows looking down into the atrium from the fourth floor, he says he finds the view exhilarating rather than scary. “I feel like I’m getting away with something,” he comments, “because hardly anyone in the library can see me, but I can see them. I don’t find it frightening, because there’s so much concrete to protect my body.”

  In focusing on this, the placement of his own body in relation to all that concrete, Gatto has arrived at something central to Kahn’s design. Logically, one should feel threatened by these massive structures—potentially crushed, or at any rate crushable. Instead, one feels elevated. It is almost as if the weight of the heavy materials exists not to bear down on you, but to lift you up. Drew Gatto describes it as an “overall feeling that the building is floating, on air or on a body of water, like a large cruise ship: like I’m suspended above the ground.” And this, for him, goes hand in hand with another feeling, equally important in making the library such a satisfying place to work, or read, or simply sit and think: the sense one has “that the center of gravity is not below us, but above us. The building is flip-flopped, with the huge X, the foundation, above us, and the lightness below us.” Is the lightness that is below us the opposite of weight, or is it the opposite of dark? In a building that somehow manages to blur the boundaries between sight and the other senses, there can be no firm answer to such a question.