Gebruiker:TheNk22/Phillips Exeter Academy Library
Philips Exeter Academy Library | ||
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Buitenzijde van de bibliotheek
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Opgericht | 21 oktober 1972 | |
Locatie | Exeter (New Hampshire) | |
Type | Schoolbibliotheek | |
Collectie | ||
Aantal | 160.000 | |
Personen | ||
Directeur | Gail G. Scanlon | |
Medewerkers | 18 | |
Website |
De Philips Exeter Academy Library (ook bekend als: Class of 1945 Library) is de bibliotheek van de Phillips Exeter Academy kostschool in Exeter (New Hampshire). Het is de grootste bibliotheek voor een middelbare school ter wereld, met meer dan 160.000 boeken op de plank. Het huidige gebouw is ontworpen in 1965 door Louis Kahn.
Geschiedenis
[bewerken | brontekst bewerken]De bibliotheek was tegelijkertijd opgericht met de school zelf, maar werd in de beginjaren amper gebruikt. Tot in 1905 aan toe had de bibliotheek slechts twee kamers en zo'n tweeduizend boeken.[1]
Gebouw
[bewerken | brontekst bewerken]Het gebouw is ontworpen door de Amerikaanse architect Louis Kahn tussen 1965 en (jaar).
(chamfering, junks)
Na de oplevering ontstonden er onvoorziene problemen in het gebruik. Zo werden er propjes van balkons gegooid door leerlingen, gezien het vanaf de binnenplaats het moeilijk zichtbaar is waar de propjes vandaan komen.[2]
Galerij
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Het atrium van de bibliotheek
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Het atrium gezien vanaf een verdieping
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Plafond
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Leestafels
Engels
[bewerken | brontekst bewerken]Architecture
[bewerken | brontekst bewerken]The library has an almost cubical shape: each of its four sides is 111 feet (33 m) wide and 80 feet (24 m) tall.[3]:309 It is constructed in three concentric areas (which Kahn called "doughnuts").[4]:87 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".[3]:306 The outer area, which houses the reading carrels, is made of brick. The middle area, which contains the heavy book stacks, is made of reinforced concrete. The inner area is an atrium.
The library's heating and cooling needs are supplied by the nearby dining hall, which Kahn built at the same time as the library, but which is considered to be of less architectural significance.:202
Exterior
[bewerken | brontekst bewerken]![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/Phillips-Exeter-Academy-Library-Exterior-Exeter-New-Hampshire-Apr-2014-b.jpg/260px-Phillips-Exeter-Academy-Library-Exterior-Exeter-New-Hampshire-Apr-2014-b.jpg)
The building committee's document specified that the new library should be "unpretentious, though in a handsome, inviting contemporary style".[5] 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.[3]:309 Kahn said, "The weight of the brick makes it dance like a fairy above and groan below."[6]
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".[7]:540 Each of these four brick "plate-walls," which house the library carrels, is 16 feet (4.9 m) deep.[3]:308
At the top of the exterior walls is a row of openings similar to the windows below except that these openings are above the roof and have no glass.[3]:309 Vincent Scully said that Kahn was drawn to architecture based on "solid, almost primitive, masonry masses with voids in them without glass."[8]:4 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.[3]:320
Another arcade circles the building on the ground floor. Kahn disliked the idea of a building that was dominated by its entrance, so he concealed the main entrance to the library behind this arcade. His original design, however, called for landscaping with a paved forecourt that would have indicated the entrance without disrupting the symmetry of the facade.:191 Architectural historian William Jordy said, "Perverse as the hidden entrance may seem, it emphatically reinforces Kahn's statement that his design begins on the periphery with the circle of individual carrels, each with its separate window."[9]
Interior
[bewerken | brontekst bewerken]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.":194 David Rineheart, who worked as an architect for Kahn, said, "for Lou, every building was a temple. Salk was a temple for science. Dhaka was a temple for government. Exeter was a temple for learning.":180
Because the stacks are visible from the floor of the central hall, the layout of the library is clear to the visitor at a glance, which was one of the goals the academy's building committee had set for Kahn.[5]
The central room is 52 feet (15.8 m) high, as measured from the floor to the beginning of the roof structure, and 32 feet (9.8 m) wide. Those dimensions approximate a ratio known as the golden ratio, which was studied by the ancient Greeks and has been considered the ideal architectural ratio for centuries.[3]:309
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.:129 He also noted that the human body is proportioned so that it can fit in both shapes, a concept that was famously expressed with a combined circle and square by Leonardo da Vinci in his drawing Vitruvian Man.The topic was repeatedly raised by Kahn in several projects.[10]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/Phillips_Exeter_Academy_library_carrels_2.jpg/300px-Phillips_Exeter_Academy_library_carrels_2.jpg)
The specifications of the academy's building committee called for a large number of carrels (the library has 210) and for the carrels to be placed near windows so they could receive natural light.:390 The latter point matched Kahn's personal inclinations exactly because he himself strongly preferred natural light: "He is also known to have worked by a window, refusing to switch on an electric light even on the darkest of days."[11] 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.[3]:304 For Kahn, the essence of a library was the act of taking a book from a shelf and walking a few steps to a window for a closer look: "A man with a book goes to the light. A library begins that way. He will not go fifty feet away to an electric light.":76 Each carrel area is associated with two levels of book stacks, with the upper level structured as a mezzanine that overlooks the carrels. This arrangement of numbered floors and mezzanines (B, G, 1, 1M, 2, 2M, 3, 3M, 4) elegantly skirted the town code limiting buildings to four stories. The book stacks also look out into the atrium.
The inherent massiveness of the brick "plate-wall" structure of the outer part of the library helps to create the cloistered atmosphere that Kahn felt was appropriate for library carrels.[3]:305 While explaining his proposal for the library at Washington University, Kahn had used the example of the cloistered carrels at the monastic library at Dunham, England, to explain his "desire to find a space construction system in which the carrels were inherent in the support which harbored them ... Wall-bearing masonry construction with its niches and vaults has the appealing structural order to provide naturally such spaces.":69,70
Architectural interpretations
[bewerken | brontekst bewerken]![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/Phillips_Exeter_Academy_library_atrium_cross_beams_closeup.jpg/260px-Phillips_Exeter_Academy_library_atrium_cross_beams_closeup.jpg)
Architectural experts sometimes differ in their interpretations of Kahn's design. For example, in reasoning why the cross beams at the clerestory windows above the atrium are so massive, Carter Wiseman says, "While they appear to be—and indeed are—structural, they are far deeper than necessary; their no-less-important role was to diffuse the sunlight coming in from the surrounding clerestory windows and reflect it down into the atrium.":198 Sarah Williams Goldhagen thinks there is more to the story, asserting that "the concrete X-shaped cross below the skylit ceiling at the Exeter Library is grossly exaggerated for dramatic effect."[12] 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."[4]:87 Kahn similarly floated a massive concrete structure above the sanctuary of the First Unitarian Church of Rochester, which he designed a few years earlier. The library is also often discussed in comparison with contemporary sacred buildings. The plans have some characteristics of Vasrtu Purusha Mandala as well as other symbolic forms that allow various symbolic interpretations.[13]
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.[8]:10 In his essay "Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome", Vincent Scully argues that Kahn followed this practice in several of his buildings, including this library, saying, "And in his library at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Kahn won't even let it become a building; he wants it to remain a ruin. The walls don't connect at the top. They remain like a hollow shell".[8]:12 Romaldo Giurgola, on the other hand, avoids this interpretation in the entry he wrote for Louis Kahn in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects. In it, while discussing the arrangement of exterior components of Kahn's National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, Giurgola wrote, "This relationship with daylight was the determining element behind this solution, rather than the formal desire to 'create ruins,' as some critics have suggested." In the very next paragraph Guirgola describes the chamfered corners of the library by saying only that Kahn used this device to show that the structural importance of the corner is greatly reduced in buildings like the Exeter Library that are constructed with reinforced concrete and other modern materials.[7]:540
- ↑ Clark, Susannah (2006). An Open Book. The Exeter Bulletin (Winter) (Phillips Exeter Academy). Gearchiveerd van origineel op 11 augustus 2013.
- ↑ (en) Wiseman, Carter (2007). Louis I. Kahn - Beyond Time and Style: A Life in Architecture. W.W Norton & Company, New York, "A "Temple for Learning"", p180-205.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i McCarter, Robert (2005). Louis I. Kahn. Phaidon Press, London. ISBN 0-7148-4045-9.
- ↑ a b James-Chakraborty, Kathleen (2004). Our Architect. The Exeter Bulletin (Spring) (Phillips Exeter Academy). Gearchiveerd van origineel op 27 mei 2010.
- ↑ a b Design of the Library. Phillips Exeter Academy. Gearchiveerd op July 30, 2011. Geraadpleegd op 8 februari 2011.
- ↑ Huxtable, Ada Louise (2008). On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change. Walker Publishing Company, New York, 190. ISBN 978-0-8027-1707-8.
- ↑ a b
- ↑ a b c Scully, Vincent (1993). Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome (Winter) (California Institute of Technology).
- ↑ Jordy, William (2005). Symbolic Essence and Other Writings on Modern Architecture and American Culture. Yale University Press, New Haven, p. 254. ISBN 0-300-09448-5.
- ↑ Brnic, Ivica (2019). Nahe Ferne: Sakrale Aspekte im Prisma der Profanbauten von Tadao Ando, Louis I. Kahn und Peter Zumthor. Park Books, Zurich, p. 205. ISBN 978-3-03860-121-0.
- ↑ Fleming, Steven (2006). Theorising Daylight: Kahn's Unitarian Church and Plato's Super-Form, The Good. arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 10 (1): 25 (Cambridge University Press). DOI: 10.1017/S1359135506000091.
- ↑ Goldhagen, Sarah (2001). Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn, p. 3. ISBN 978-0-300-07786-5.
- ↑ Brnic, Ivica (2019). Nahe Ferne: Sakrale Aspekte im Prisma der Profanbauten von Tadao Ando, Louis I. Kahn und Peter Zumthor. Park Books, Zurich, 169,170. ISBN 978-3-03860-121-0.