VSBA

Baker Library, the College’s beloved humanities and social sciences library, has been the center of academic life at Dartmouth College.  The Berry addition doubles the size of the existing facility and accommodates new public functions, technical services, reading areas, a café, and the computing services and History departments.  The original Baker Library building, essentially unchanged since its construction in 1929, was renovated to accommodate new mechanical systems and comply with current fire and life safety codes.  Certain traditional reading rooms and gracious public spaces were carefully restored.

The expanded library occupies a pivotal site between the proposed academic row on one side and the College’s New England commons — the College Green — on the other, thus becoming a focal point at the heart and crossroads of both old and new campuses.  The Berry addition extends the library north, anticipating and helping to generate orderly campus development in that direction.  Its linear form and imageful north facade terminate the axis of the new row and identify it much as the existing south facade of Baker Library defines the College Green to the south.

VSBA’s challenge was to transform an underutilized building on an important site into an accessible, functional, and visually evocative library for rare books and manuscripts with a secure and carefully controlled environment.  The scope of the renovation included a reading room, study and seminar rooms, offices, and technical support spaces.

Our design preserves the monumental interior hall as the reading room.  As the original exterior walls of the building could not effectively provide thermal and moisture protection for the controlled collections space without substantial modifications, an aluminum and glass curtainwall enclosure was designed to create a transparent “building within a building.”  This glazed “lantern” of book stacks maintains temperature and humidity levels for the sensitive collection, protecting them in a vapor-tight environment while making them more visually accessible.

The reading room accommodates 36 users and is surrounded by shelves of reference materials.  Office and seminar rooms beneath the balconies are acoustically isolated to allow groups the use of collections with contemporary audio and visual media.  Above, the mezzanine provides students with a comfortable and quiet study area, with views from the large windows to the surrounding campus, lending an outward focus to a building that had formerly been oriented towards an interior stage.  Additional book storage is accommodated in an adjacent underground area with vegetative roof to blend seamlessly into the surrounding landscape.  The new Special Collections Library is a dialogue between the original neoclassical and the new.  The machine-like curtainwall is juxtaposed with gentle detailing on the walls, ceiling, and balcony front, while the millwork and curtainwall relate to the original building’s variety of scales.

VSBA renovated and expanded Palmer Hall, Princeton University’s original physics laboratory, to house the new Frist Campus Center. The University first proposed a campus center in the 1920s, but the project wasn’t undertaken until the 1990s. Palmer Hall, historically significant though deteriorated and underutilized at the periphery of the traditional campus core, over time became the geographical center of the changing campus. Paths linking academic, social, recreational, and residential activities intersected at the site.

The design for the campus center is organized to reinforce these paths and establish the facility as a locus of activity along these routes — at once a destination and point of passage and casual interaction. The primary procession through the facility follows the terraced grading of the site. Visitors approaching from the north flow through a new arcade, designed as an extension of the existing building, into entries at Palmer’s lower level and move south through a series of “streets” lined with shops, student mail and information boards. At the end of these paths is a light-filled lounge overlooking an atrium with views opening out to the south. A generous flight of stairs leads further down to a dining room which opens south onto a terrace and lawn. Multiple entries are provided at this level for those approaching from the south.

The adaptation of an existing building is appropriate for a campus center, providing discovered places and lived-in spaces for a mix of uses. As a form of generic loft building — with repetitive, generous spaces readily adapted for multiple uses — Palmer provides for many aspects of the campus center program. These spaces are juxtaposed with open and flowing spaces appropriate to the new construction and constituting the south face of the building as a whole.

Frist’s state-of-the art academic spaces include new classrooms outfitted with extensive audiovisual systems; one was restored with the original seating and a display of the room’s original scientific apparatuses, while another retained its original vaulted and ribbed plaster ceiling but was completely transformed to house a film and performance theater. Frist also offers a home to Princeton’s East Asian Library and Gest Collection.

The new arcade and multiple entries at the north face make more public the rather private and closed façade of Palmer, while respecting the beautiful quality of the Jacobean style of its architecture. But there is no ambiguity between new and existing in the complex. The south, window-walled façade cloaking the wing of new construction represents the singular nature of the Frist Campus Center — a communal entity and a place of community. At night the lighted interior is opened-up, displaying multiple architectural layers and a rich mix of activity.