Phillips Exeter Academy Library is a library that serves Phillips Exeter Academy, an independent boarding school located in Exeter, New Hampshire. It is the largest secondary school library in the world, containing 160,000 volumes over nine levels with a shelf capacity of 250,000 volumes. Even as late as 1905 the library had only two rooms and 2,000 volumes.

thumb|upright|left|Exeter Library atrium with crossbeams above and circular staircase below

In 1912 the Davis Library was added to the campus with space for 5,000 volumes. Although a major improvement, its atmosphere was inhospitable by the standards of later generations. Stacks were locked to students, for example, and the librarian's office was located at the entrance to the stacks to maximize control over entry. Decisions about book selections and the library's program were in the hands of an all-male faculty committee instead of the female librarian. Architectural historian Vincent Scully acknowledged its architectural significance by using a photo of it as the frontispiece for his book Modern Architecture and Other Essays.

On November 16, 1971, classes were suspended for a day, and students, faculty, and staff moved books (the library had 60,000 volumes by this time) from the old Davis Library into the new library.

Henry Bedford, who became librarian shortly after the new library was occupied, supervised the transition not only to the new building but also to a new way of operating a library. Staff librarians were encouraged to see themselves as co-instructors with the regular faculty and to put less emphasis on shushing library patrons. A piano was installed and the library began sponsoring lectures and concerts. making it the largest secondary school library in the world. Describing the book as an offering, Kahn said, "How precious a book is in light of the offering, in light of the one who has the privilege of the offering. The library tells you of this offering".

The building committee carefully considered what they wanted in a new library and presented their ideas to Kahn in an unusually detailed document that went through more than fifty drafts. In the words of Robert McCarter, author of Louis I. Kahn, "From the very beginning of the design process, Kahn conceived of the three types of spaces as if they were three buildings constructed of different materials and of different scales – buildings-within-buildings". Kahn accordingly made the building's exterior relatively undramatic, suitable for a small New England town. Its facade is primarily brick with teak wood panels at most windows marking the location of a pair of wooden carrels. The bricks are load-bearing; that is, the weight of the outer portion of the building is carried by the bricks themselves, not by a hidden steel frame. Kahn calls this fact to the viewer's attention by making the brick piers noticeably thicker at the bottom where they have more weight to bear. The windows are correspondingly wider toward the top where the piers are thinner.

The corners of the building are chamfered (cut off), allowing the viewers to see the outer parts of the building's structure, the outer "doughnut." The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects says, "Kahn sometimes perceived a building as enclosed by 'plate-walls,' and to give emphasis to this structural form, he interrupted the plates at the corner, leaving a gap between them. The Library at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire (1967–1972) is a classic example". Each of these four brick "plate-walls," which house the library carrels, is 16 feet (4.9 m) deep. The bottoms of these window-like openings are 6 feet (1.8 m) above the floor of an arcade that follows the perimeter of the top of building.

Interior

A circular double staircase built from concrete and faced with travertine greets the visitor upon entry into the library. At the top of the stairs the visitor enters a dramatic central hall with enormous circular openings that reveal several floors of book stacks. At the top of the atrium, two massive concrete cross beams diffuse the light entering from the clerestory windows.

Carter Wiseman, author of Louis Kahn: Beyond Time and Style, said, "The many comparisons of the experience of entering Exeter's main space to that of entering a cathedral are not accidental. Kahn clearly wanted the students to be humbled by the sense of arrival, and he succeeded."

The circle and the square that are combined so dramatically in the atrium were considered to be the paradigmatic geometric units by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.

thumb|300px| left| The outer part of the building, which houses the carrels, is built of load-bearing brick. Each carrel floor spans two levels of book stacks.

The specifications of the academy's building committee called for a large number of carrels (the library has 210) Each pair of carrels has a large window above, and each individual carrel has a small window at desk height with a sliding panel for adjusting the light.

The placement of carrel spaces at the periphery was the product of thinking that began years earlier when Kahn submitted proposals for a new library at Washington University. There he dispensed with the traditional arrangement of completely separate library spaces for books and readers, usually with book stacks on the periphery of the library and reading rooms toward the center. Instead he felt that reading spaces should be near the books and also to natural light. Kathleen James-Chakraborty goes even further: "Above, in the most sublime gesture of all, floats a concrete cross brace, illuminated by clerestory windows. Its weight, which appears ready to come crashing down upon the onlooker, revives the sense of threat dissipated elsewhere by the reassuring familiarity of the brick skin and wood details."

Another issue is the extent to which Kahn deliberately introduced elements into some of his buildings that give them the ageless atmosphere of ruins. Kahn himself spoke of "wrapping ruins around buildings", although in the context of another project.

  • In 2007, the library was ranked #80 on the List of America's Favorite Architecture by the American Institute of Architects.

References

  • The Phillips Exeter Academy library's web site is an excellent resource. Click on "Design of the Library" to see links to a Kahn Reference Guide, Floor Schematics, etc.
  • Figure 6 of an academic paper called "The Tectonic Integration of Louis I. Kahn′s Exeter Library" provides a helpful exploded view drawing of the library's constituent parts.
  • Louis Kahn’s Society of Rooms, a video by Stewart Hicks, a professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has a segment on the Phillips Exeter Academy Library.