‘Knowledge is something which doesn’t
have a weight,’ Wolfgang Tschapeller says.
He’s describing his design for the Mui Ho
Fine Arts Library at Cornell, a renovation
that opened up an airy space in the university
campus’ historic Rand Hall. It is organised
around a singular concept: a series of stacks
made from metal grate and hung from
the ceiling. The books appear to be almost
floating, ephemeral.
‘There’s something about the weight and
position of the books and stacks; just like
knowledge itself, it’s essentially immaterial.’
It’s heady stuff, but the Austrian architect,
who graduated from the Cornell School
of Architecture and returned in 2014 with
a commission to renovate this library, does
not shy away from a conceptual approach.
Tschapeller’s intervention is part of the
equally heady complex that makes up the
College for Art, Architecture and Planning:
a constellation of tight-knit buildings that
also includes Milstein Hall, the architecture
school designed in 2011 by OMA, masters
of the powerful, concept-driven approach.
The library building – an existing yellow
brick structure from the 1910s – is flush
with Milstein Hall. The two are connected
through an OMA-designed volume, whose
low ceiling covers an open pathway that runs
from the parking lot to the Milstein and
library entrances. Its narrow darkness is just
compelling enough to make walking into
the renovated library – centred around one
massive open room flooded with daylight
and kept temperate courtesy of sophisticated
climate engineering – feel like a moment
of weightless expansion.
That sense of expansiveness is a fitting
new life for the old building, which had fallen
into disrepair. Tschapeller’s changes were
initiated to both rehabilitate the culturally
important structure, and allow for the kind
of state-of-the-art technological offerings
key to contemporary libraries. As well as, of
course, storing books.
Young scholars are encouraged to takelibraries seriously, to feel the importance of (^) »
Shelf belief
There’s much suspense at
Cornell University’s newly
designed fine arts library
PHOTOGRAPHY: JASON KOXVOLD
WRITER: EVA HAGBERG
Architecture