Dale Cotton for Princeton University

As seen from the front entrance, an atrium-passageway painted in brilliant colors divides the building in two. At right, the science library proper is visible behind its curtain wall of glass; at left are classrooms and offices.

University Librarian Karin Trainer saw the need for this remarkable place a decade ago. Old barriers between disciplines were fast falling, as courses on such newfangled amalgams as “biogeochemistry” suggested. And it was getting harder to maintain separate branch libraries — more and more, they needed the same books and journals. Meanwhile, science departments were hiring new faculty and bursting at the seams. They wanted the libraries out.

In creating Lewis Library, the biology, geosciences, and math-physics collections got “interfiled,” along with chemistry and astrophysics, which were trucked over from their respective outposts. In the process, about 13 percent of the books were culled and sent to distant storage. Branch librarians and staff facing the merge were “equal parts excited and anxious,” says Patricia Gaspari-Bridges, who heads the new facility. Everything would be different here, including working shoulder-to-shoulder instead of in branches and making longer treks from desk to stacks. “But these are supremely capable and experienced science librarians and support staff,” she says. “We planned this move together over the past six years, and everyone went forward with a sense of adventure and a very positive spirit.”

Gehry Partners worked closely with these librarians — the “user group” — and even built a full-scale, cardboard mockup of the welcome desk (a yellow-topped biomorphic fantasy that goes wriggling across the room) so they could put their computers on it and determine the proper “anthropometrics,” as Webb calls it — the optimal configuration for person-to-person interaction with patrons around a computer screen. Trainer flew to California five times to study models of the building. “We might say we need more seating, or more group-study rooms,” she recalls. “If we said, ‘We don’t like that,’ Gehry would take a chunk of the building in his hands — he can just pick up a whole piece — and twist it or put it somewhere else.” And so the design evolved by lively interchange between East Coast librarians and a West Coast “starchitect” who proved to be surprisingly responsive.

Will undergraduates use the place the way focus groups suggested they would? It will take months, Trainer acknowledges, to know whether the experimental building works as planned. “Students told us they wanted some very private spaces to study. And that they wanted some big tables where they can spread out, and those group-study rooms, which their homework increasingly requires, since it’s thought that good research is more collaborative now.” But whether they will actually feel at home in the second-floor Treehouse, as intended, and fall comfortably asleep over their laptops in the fourth-floor reading room, remains to be seen.

Across an astonishing, sunlit atrium-passageway with walls that plunge like skirts of glass and glow with painted colors (in orange, red, blue, and green) lies another section of the building, which houses high-tech entities — among them, the Office of Information Technology’s Educational Technologies Center, the New Media Center, PICSciE (Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering), and the University’s television studio. Planning for all this proved tricky, since technology is zooming forward. Serge Goldstein, director of academic services in the Office of Information Technology, wonders if the room housing OIT computers — conceived four long years ago — is big enough. “IT is constantly changing, and there is this burgeoning demand for high-performance computing,” he explains. “Computers are getting smaller, but there are more of them now, and they require space for cooling. Back when we designed the room, we didn’t realize how popular this service would be.”

But it’s aesthetics, not functionality, that has got everybody talking. “He’s an artist,” Peter Lewis says of his friend Gehry. “Spiritually, that’s what he is.” To architecture dean Allen, Gehry has pioneered “treating architecture as almost a personal art form. It’s a very individual, expressionistic activity.” Photographer Dale Cotton was given access to document the construction process for the University. “It’s like a Cubist painting,” he concludes. “Up close there are so many fragments and disjunctures, your eye almost can’t take it in. The interior is like a cityscape, monumentally complicated. The variety is extraordinary.”  

Former Architectural Record editor Stephen A. Kliment *57 agrees: Lewis Library is “unusually free in the way its forms are used. This is typical of Gehry’s more recent work. You walk around it and you see pieces of it.” The plunging, stainless-steel walls of the east front wink to the twisting, rusted-steel forms of Richard Serra’s Cor-Ten sculpture, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” coincidentally installed eight years ago just a few feet to the east. Serra and Gehry have a long-standing artistic relationship, and Serra sculptures dominate the ground floor at Bilbao.

Robert Spencer, The New York Times

Frank Gehry, left, and Craig Webb ’74 in 2004 at MIT, where they worked on the Ray and Maria Stata Center complex.

Gehry may be an artist, but his detailing “mostly consists of responses to the accidents of form,” says Henry H. Thomas, Princeton’s project manager for the building. Instead of ornament, “it’s really just things smashing together.” The keynote is utilitarianism, starting at the entrance pavilion with its exposed I-beams and clamped-on industrial light fixtures as mundane as those on a tollbooth on the turnpike, through the Gehry-designed carrels made of rugged-looking Douglas fir. “There’s an off-the-shelf quality to the curtain walls, the stairs, the handrails,” Allen observes. “There is an adventurous quality, but a real pragmatism, too. It goes back to the work Gehry did in the 1970s at his house in Santa Monica with the chain link and corrugated metal, when cost was a real factor.” In that iconic work, the struggling architect radically refashioned a conventional bungalow, in the process stumbling upon the angular, akimbo, looking-glass world of Deconstructivism.

Not everyone will admire his sometimes-coarse aesthetic. “Gehry is building not cultural artifacts, but fashion statements,” says Catesby M. Leigh ’79, an architectural critic familiar to PAW readers for his attacks on modernism, which he faults for constantly changing its stripes.   “Princeton has bought into the media hype about the cultural imperatives of the day. In our media-driven culture, the image of the building and its shock effect and novelty are crucial selling points.” But architect Kliment is untroubled by modernism’s shifting approaches, even as Gehry succeeds Robert Venturi ’47 *50 as Princeton’s definition of hip. “Just as a university must have the most up-to-date methods in research, it should do the same in architecture. We live in an unstable world, and that’s reflected. There’s no way of hiding the society in the architecture.” Look back a thousand years, Kliment says — medieval society produced Gothic the way the digital age gives us Gehry.  

Has Princeton embraced trendiness by tapping the world’s most talked-about architect? Rudenstine answers no. “It would be absurd for universities not to look at the best architects in the world. They always have — think of Christopher Wren at Oxford.” Gutmann agrees: Lewis Library “symbolizes a commitment to supporting the highest level of human achievement,” giving a forum for Gehry when he’s at the top of his game. Critics may complain that the price was too high — the long delay and spiraling costs of building materials busted the original budget. Still, “overall, Gehry’s track record is exceptionally good,” says MIT’s Mitchell. “The other strategy is, don’t try to innovate, don’t take risks. Universities should be innovating and leading.”  

More than a million people visit the Bilbao museum annually. Princeton doesn’t need a “Bilbao effect” — an image overhaul achieved by a dazzling new building, Gutmann says — but one suspects that its embrace of an architectural superstar helps give a feeling of freshness to a very old place that has never entirely shaken its Fitzgeraldesque reputation for stodginess and languid complacency, no matter how hard we try. Today’s academic leaders seem to fear stuffiness, the taint of not being considered progressive, of being left behind by the cutting-edge MITs of the world. Lewis Library “will stretch people’s imaginations,” Gutmann predicts, “about not only architecture, but universities.” And, one presumes, about Princeton itself.

Peter Lewis has commissioned a film contrasting the building of neo-medieval Whitman College and high-tech Lewis Library, that visitor from another world entirely. “It says everything about Princeton,” he observes proudly about this building he made possible. “Risking, learning — it’s a whole new design, a new process, everything — and growing as a result. Openness was required to embrace this, when many alumni think of Princeton as collegiate gothic. Recognizing the need for a facility that will make us a better place. That’s what we’re all about, getting better. And this is part of that.”

W. Barksdale Maynard ’88 is a lecturer in the School of Architecture and the Princeton Environmental Institute.

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