Dale Cotton for Princeton University

This spacious reading room on the second floor has been dubbed the Treehouse for its leafy views. Fabricating the steel for its complicated roof proved challenging.

After the revisions, the view from Ivy Lane is far less shocking now: The brick sections are downright boxy. But Dean Stanley Allen *88 of the School of Architecture is pleased with the changes. “Good clients get good buildings, I think,” he says. “The project went through several iterations and it really improved. It’s a bit more disciplined than the earlier versions.” Allen likes the way “the rectilinear parts play off the curvilinear.”

Everyone knew this would be a difficult project. “Gehry buildings are adventurous, innovative buildings,” says MIT’s Mitchell. “They are nonrepetitive and of great spatial and formal complexity. There is more risk attached to that. But he is immensely resourceful and very highly skilled.” Gehry has pioneered the use of a sophisticated computer platform called CATIA (Computer-Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application), a revolutionary leap in architectural practice. Using CATIA, Lewis Library was built twice: first inside a computer, where it could be endlessly tweaked and adjusted, and then for real — in steel, concrete, and brick.

Even with CATIA, the problems were thorny. A representative of the project’s initial construction manager, Skanska USA Building, told New York Construction   in 2006, “There are not many straight pieces of steel on the entire project. There are rolled beams and kinked beams with numerous articulations.” Getting these right proved extremely difficult, especially those above the spacious reading room looking out at Washington Road called the Turtle (now dubbed the Treehouse), which required two expensive tries. University officials won’t say how much the building cost, but the figure has risen from the $60 million originally budgeted to at least $74 million authorized in the 2006–07 treasurer’s report, the latest available. Lewis Library was supposed to be finished in 25 months, but instead took 45. Halfway along, Skanska was replaced by Barr & Barr. Whitman College, though three times bigger and built with archaic technology — ponderous load-bearing walls — beat Lewis to completion by a year. And though there was trouble with Skanska — five contractors who worked on the library pleaded guilty to paying more than $100,000 in bribes to a Skanska construction manager to obtain work — the University remains happy with Gehry’s team. “We have been extremely pleased with the amount of time and energy the firm invested in this project,” says Executive Vice President Mark Burstein, “and its success is largely due to their commitment to Princeton.”  

“A lot of people think he is an artist who doesn’t care about functionality,” says Gutmann. “Anyone who has worked with Frank knows that’s wrong.” When MIT’s Stata Center sprang dozens of leaks, Gutmann led a Princeton team to Boston to find out why. (Gehry blames Skanska, his partner there; MIT has sued them both.) “We learned a lot about what not to do,” she recalls, saying that Gehry concurred. Subsequently, Lewis Library underwent rigorous leak-testing with a fire hose. Its stainless-steel faces, at least, ought to be impervious to water: They are formed of old-fashioned standing-seam metal, used on many historic campus buildings, including the Chapel roof. “We like sheet metal because it can be both roof and wall and create a single volume out of the same material,” says project designer Webb. To allow super-long pieces, huge coils of metal were delivered to the site, then unrolled and run through dies to shape them. After the lessons of Disney Hall, where steel surfaces nearly blinded onlookers and had to be sandblasted, an embossed “linen finish” was used at Princeton. “It cuts glare and gives a double reading of the industrial and yet the very fine,” Webb explains. “It picks up the light, the color of the sky and trees, and really ties the building to its surroundings.”

Standing alone on the fourth floor last summer before the library was open to the public, amid desks that never had known gum or graffiti, a visitor could ruminate on the future generations who will study here. For today’s students, this quirky place will be their familiar Princeton, just as Firestone (which turns 60 this year) was ours. That’s a disconcerting thought, to go with the disconcerting architecture of that extraordinary floor with its lofty view — somehow suggesting the command deck of Starship USS Enterprise as reinterpreted by the wild-eyed set designer for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari .  

But more unnerving is the question that gradually steals upon you: You’re in a library, so where are all the bookshelves? With a shudder, perhaps, you understand — this is the 21st century now, no kidding, and we must see libraries in a whole new way. No more mausoleums of monographs, musty charnel houses of glue, string, and wood pulp! Actually, there are bookshelves — and 325,000 books — but they are barely evident, being confined almost entirely to the basement, where Lewis Library proper flows seamlessly into the old math-physics library in Fine Hall. Paul H. LaMarche, vice provost for space programming and planning — a title that itself has a New Millennium ring — looks askance at “space sitting under books” when it could be used for more dynamic purposes. For him, Lewis Library points to tomorrow: “It’s not crammed full of books. It’s crammed full of other things” — miles of computer cable, an electronic classroom, wireless routers, and scores of tables and carrels ready for student laptops.  

Dale Cotton for Princeton University

From this study area on the top level, students can take in the stainless-steel roof and different shapes of the building visible outside, and the campus beyond.

123