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 bastardized cathedral aesthetics and the university's timid anti-modernism. Many students of architecture leveled similar criticisms. Others responded to the building's fusion of academic purpose and ecclesiastical architecture, asserting that the project was either sanctimonious or sacrilegious. More recent reviews have praised the building's ambition, beauty, and pragmatism.
The library is situated on Yale's Cross Campus, the central quadrangle of the university. Surrounding buildings, including Berkeley College, Trumbull College, and Sterling Law Building were designed by Rogers and built in the same period and Gothic Revival style as the library.
The entrance hall of the library is known as the "nave" because its plan imitates the main approach of a cathedral. At its western terminus is a chancel containing an ornate circulation desk and altarpiece mural painted by Eugene Savage. Constructed of Indiana limestone and Ohio sandstone blocks, the nave is a self-supporting stone structure with none of the steel reinforcement used elsewhere in the library. It is elaborately decorated with stone and wood carving, ironwork, stained glass windows, and ceiling bosses. The main hall is flanked by two aisles, which originally held card catalogs for the library bookstacks. Though the original catalog drawers remain in the aisles, the cards have been removed and the aisles converted to seating areas and a computer lab. At its western end it is intersected by a transept, which leads to the library's main reading room on one end and its wing on the other. For many years, smoking was allowed in the nave, which left a layer of soot on its upper levels. Beginning in 2013, the nave underwent a $20-million, yearlong renovation to clean its surfaces, restore its architectural details, overhaul building systems, and reconfigure visitor circulation and services.
Fifteen levels of library materials, primarily books, are housed in the building's tower, commonly referred to as the "Stacks." Originally intended to house 3.5 million volumes, it i