Sterling Memorial Library
|Sterling Memorial Library|
Facade and tower of Sterling Memorial Library
|Architectural style||Collegiate Gothic|
|Address||120 High Street|
|Town or city||New Haven, Connecticut|
|Height||150 feet (46 m)|
|Floor area||441,651 square feet (41,030.7 m2)|
|Design and construction|
|Architect||James Gamble Rogers|
Sterling Memorial Library is the main library building of the Yale University Library system in New Haven, Connecticut. Opened in 1931, the library was designed by James Gamble Rogers as the centerpiece of Yale's Gothic Revival campus. It is elaborately ornamented, featuring extensive sculpture and painting as well as hundreds of panes of stained glass created by G. Owen Bonawit. In addition to five large reading rooms, a Music Library, and courtyard on the ground floor, the library's tower has sixteen levels of bookstacks containing over 4 million volumes. It connects via tunnel to the underground Bass Library, which contains an additional 150,000 volumes.
- 1 History
- 2 Building
- 3 Decoration
- 4 Collections
- 5 References
- 6 Further reading
For the ninety years prior to the construction of Sterling Memorial Library, Yale's library collections had been held in the College Library, a chapel-like Gothic Revival building on Yale's Old Campus now known as Dwight Hall. Built to house a collection of 40,000 books in the 1840s, and later expanded to Linsly Hall and Chittenden Hall, the old library could not hold Yale's swelling book collection, which had grown to over one million volumes. In 1918, Yale received a $17-million bequest from John W. Sterling, founder of the New York law firm Shearman & Sterling, providing that Yale construct "at least one enduring, useful and architecturally beautiful edifice." The largest bequest in the history of any American university, it initiated a major period of construction on Yale's central campus. Because of the library collection's growth, the university decided to make the centerpiece of Sterling's gift a new library with a capacity for 3.5 million volumes.
The building's original architect, Bertram Goodhue, intended the library to resemble his State Capitol Building in Lincoln, Nebraska, with the library's books in a prominent tower. When Goodhue died in 1924, the project passed to James Gamble Rogers, the university's consulting architect. Originally, Rogers planned to balance the library with a 5,000-seat chapel on the opposite end of Cross Campus' main axis, but the absence of a financier and the end of compulsory undergraduate chapel services in 1926 scuttled the project. Instead, Rogers circumscribed Goodhue's tower plan with an "ecclesiastical metaphor": a cathedral plan, in Roger's words, "as near to modern Gothic as we dared to make it." He modeled the library's entrance hall to resemble a vaulted nave and commissioned extensive stained glass and stone ornament to decorate the building's interior.
The library's 122,500-square-foot (11,380 m2) footprint would take up more than half a city block, and twenty buildings were cleared for its construction, many of them private homes. Although excavation began in the fall of 1927, the construction site was not fully secured until July 1928, when a holdout homeowner finally decamped.
While the new library was planned and constructed, the university began soliciting gifts from its alumni for the new library. By 1931, the collection had grown to nearly 2 million volumes, many of them rare books and manuscripts. Among the most important of these acquisitions was a Gutenberg Bible donated by Anna Harkness. This became the centerpiece of the new library's Rare Book Room, which allowed students and researchers to browse the most valuable books in the university's collection for the first time, a function later subsumed in part by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Like much of Yale's revivalist construction of the same era, the new library was criticized as expensive and retrograde. William Harlan Hale, writing in The Nation, scorned it as a "cathedral orgy," criticized the library's bastardiz