There’s irony — not tragic but pointed — in the new Sawyer Library going the way of the old.   First in having fiscal difficulties delay its construction, and second in having its future called into doubt by a presidential transition.  This is a tale of two letters written by Morty Schapiro, sent by email to the Williams community, one in October outlining the College’s response to the global financial meltdown, and this month’s announcing his own imminent departure to assume the presidency of Northwestern.  The first brought news of the hold — perhaps one year but who really knows? — on construction of the new library, and the second means that some currently unknown person will be leading the decision to go forward when the time comes.  In several ways, it’s 1972 all over again.

The delay in completion of the Stetson-Sawyer Project does not imply abandonment of this online journal, but it does stretch out the timeline and remove some urgency.  In between the two communications from President Schapiro, I had a conversation with Dave Pilachowski, College Librarian, and found him still hopeful, even a little grateful for the breathing room the delay offered, to complete planning and preparation.  The architects were busily preparing immensely-detailed construction drawings, useful to have before the bidding process.  Asbestos abatement was going forward in Stetson, a necessary prelude to construction.  Historic appeals were in process on the disposition of the Seeley and Kellogg houses, which would have to be moved or razed as part of the project.  The overall design of the new library was not being reconsidered, but rather the administration was just waiting for the cost of money to come down, in the wake of the overall credit crunch. 

Update as of 4-30-09 :  Here’s a link to a communication from Professor Michael F. Brown, co-chair of the Stetson-Sawyer Project, which indicates current status of building plans.

Thanks to Michael Brown, professor of anthropology and co-chair of the Stetson/Sawyer Project building committee, I was able recently to tag along on a tour of the soon-to-open North and South Academic Buildings, and I found them breathtaking, both in contrast to the old warren of faculty offices in Stetson and in forecast of what the architects — Bohlin Cywinski Jackson — will do in the New Sawyer Library.  As soon as the finishing touches are complete and faculty starts to move in before the start of the school year, I will go back with a camera and post an illustrated report here.

Meanwhile, the Library Shelving Facility is filling up off Route 7 North, with all the Library collections formerly shelved in the old Stetson stacks, as well as the collections of the College Archives and Chapin Library.  In September the Archives and Chapin will re-open in a limited capacity in temporary quarters in the old Southworth School, for the duration of construction of the new library, planned for 2011 opening.

I am currently engaged with research and interviews on the building of the old Sawyer Library, and hope to compose an entertaining and informative history in the next fortnight.  Now that I am incorporating first person testimony, I will want to run my copy past a number of those involved before posting here, so there may be a delay.  Earlier this week I had a most enjoyable conversation with President Emeritus John Chandler, whose appointment was announced simultaneously with the publication of plans for the new library in 1973, so he was well-positioned to offer a unique perspective on the controversy over the building.  I have also been in touch with one of the leaders of a student movement against those plans, whose well-reasoned objections were the focus of campus debate throughout the spring of 1973, some of which seem prophetic now that the building is to be demolished.

In the meantime, I have been groping toward a better integration of text and pictures on this website.  I suspect that few readers were following the graphic links, so from now on I will incorporate thumbnails within the text itself, which can be clicked to see photographs at full size.  Retroactively, I am in the process of changing the look of prior posts and pages.  I welcome feedback and suggestions to:  ssatullo@clarkart.edu.

Maybe you’re like me, walking in and out of Stetson Hall hundreds of times without ever noticing for whom the building was named.  But with my newfound interest in Williams history, I was amused and intrigued to discover that Francis Lynde Stetson, Class of 1867, was J.P. Morgan’s lawyer, among many other attributes of success, and became a principle benefactor of William College in the early 20th century.  Alfred Clark Chapin, Class of 1869, also made a name for himself in law, business, politics, and benefactions to his alma mater.  These gentlemen would come together and create a library fit for the “gentleman’s college” Williams had become, to appropriate the terminology of Prof. Frederick Rudolph’s bicentennial essay, “Williams College 1793-1993: Three Eras, Three Cultures.”  The Stetson and Chapin libraries shared a building and defined an era, whose story is recounted in the “History 02” page now posted to this site. 

1)  The College has posted the latest architectural renderings of the New Sawyer Library here.

2)  I have finally written my history of the Stetson Library and after tinkering with the illustrations, will post it on this site by June 30th, as “History 02.”

3)  The North and South Academic Buildings, the first campus construction in the overall Stetson-Sawyer project, are on course for completion this summer, and recent pictures are available here.

While the North and South Academic Buildings approach completion by the end of the summer in a highly visible position at the center of the Williams campus, the first library construction in the whole Stetson-Sawyer project is far from sight, but nearly finished and soon to be operational.  On a fine May morning I joined a group touring the high-density shelving facility the Williams College Library has built on Route 7 North, opposite the Cozy Corner.  I took away two strong impressions:  One, that the building suggests how pure functionality can be aesthetically appealing.  And the other, fascination at seeing two book environments in which I’ve spent my life — libraries and bookstores — melding to find a new model for an old need.  The facility reminded me of nothing so much as the country’s largest book distribution warehouse, which I visited decades ago, back when computer-based stocking procedures were just being innovated.   To follow me on the tour, please click through.

The Weight of Books: Dealing with the Volume of Volumes

As libraries stride into the digital future, they cannot abandon their traditional role as repository for the weight of human knowledge as embodied in the books that have come down to us, not least in their physical volumes.  But the calculus of access has definitely changed.  Do you need to have physical access to a journal article that is readily available online?  Does a book that is consulted once in a decade need to be ready at hand, when space is at a premium for higher uses than deep storage?  Melding new technologies with the time-honored purposes of archive keeping, libraries search for efficient means to store, preserve, and access the books and materials in their care.

When I parked and walked up to the building, its surface first struck me as looking like exposed insulation, but thereafter rather appealed to me as having texture and substance.  I compared it to another concrete building about to open in Williamstown, Tadao Ando’s Stone Hill Center at the Clark, and marveled at the medium’s adaptability, from Ando’s smooth wood-like grain to this lava-like material.  As I was looking at the surface, facility supervisor David Chalifoux came up to me and explained that the building was constructed from 35’ high panels of concrete with a raked finish, the large pre-cast rectangles raised into place to define the structure.  (A slide show of the construction process can be seen here.)

Inside the office and processing area, the overall impression is of the proverbial clean, well-lighted place for books.  The rooms were not yet set up for business but seemed light and airy, and the eagerness of those who were to work there was testimonial enough to the pleasantness of the place.  Cleaning is essential to preservation of printed materials, so the lab-like feel was appropriate to the task at hand. 

Attached was the enclosed loading dock, where the facility’s dedicated van will park when not making one of its anticipated two trips a day to the libraries on campus.  It is expected that there will be retrievals in midmorning and late afternoon, so the longest wait for delivery of materials should be half a day.  (Journals and government documents will eventually be scanned instead of delivered physically.)  There is an anteroom where returning books get a high-suction vacuuming before entering the shelving facility proper, for which environmental conditions are very carefully controlled.

The stacks are accessed by a forklift, into which the attendant is strapped to move along the rows and up and down the shelves, where volumes will be arranged by size for compactness, and stored in waxed trays that slide out for access.  There is no Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress classification for shelving, no designated spot for each book, but barcodes on book and tray that are matched and stored electronically for retrieval.

In addition to stringent environmental control, the building was constructed with energy efficiency in mind, with R50 roof insulation installed and a state grant received for a photovoltaic roof that is expected to supply a third of the facility’s electricity.  The building has a state-of-the-art HVAC unit that is expected to draw visitors (just as the boiler room of the original Clark building was what other museum directors always wanted to see when they visited back in the mid-Fifties — I know because my sometime-office in shop storage is next door.)

This sort of high-density shelving facility is considered a first for a college the size of Williams, though following the model of Yale and Brown, and is likely to serve as example for others in turn.  In siting and construction it is designed to allow the addition of further modules to double the capacity or more.

A facility of this kind was under consideration even before the overall Stetson-Sawyer project took the shape it did, but it’s another instance of the serendipity of how the whole development fell into place.  Coming on line now, the LSF will facilitate the whole game of musical buildings, and obviate the need to find storage space during the displacements of construction.  The month of July will be devoted to moving collections, not just Chapin and the Archives, but Library volumes now in the closed stacks of Stetson.  Then there will be a long process of sorting materials by size, with retrievals expected to begin by next summer.  

So we go outside to look around the building.  Sure, it’s a big industrial box in a rural setting, but it has been sited with some care for its surroundings, and in the forthrightness of its materials and shape, it displays a symmetry of purpose and the aesthetic appeal of form following function.  One functional element that turns out to be beautiful is the metal mesh screen around the outdoor staircase to the building’s mechanical systems on the mezzanine level above the office areas.  Visitors may come to marvel at the HVAC unit, but will be dazzled by the light that filters into that metallic staircase.

So up in a field by the Vermont border, the Williams College Library of the 21st century begins to take shape.  The LSF will immediately relieve some space constraints and facilitate the construction process for the New Sawyer, but moreover is built for future expansion, with provision for further modules to be added as needed.  It will be a hidden resource of the College for decades to come, and a key asset for the Library as it adapts to the future.

Visiting Great Britain last month, I made pilgrimage to two great libraries, the new British Library in London and the old Bodleian Library at Oxford University (where my son is reading for a Masters in Archaeological Science.)  While asking what the library will become in the 21st century, there is something to be learned from looking at libraries that have survived many centuries.  For my observations, please click through.  Meanwhile, look here soon for my tour of the Williams College Library’s new high-density shelving facility, and for my history of Stetson Hall soon after that.

Shortly after the bus from Heathrow left me off at a small hotel in Bloomsbury, the morning after an overnight flight, I made a beeline for the British Library up on Euston Road, which my guidebook deems “London’s most important building from the late 20th century.”  Blasted by would-be architecture critic Prince Charles, and building to a price tag over half a billion pounds, the library opened in the late 90s after decades of construction, and is now widely admired and wildly popular.  Perhaps it is to libraries what the Guggenheim Bilbao is to museums, over-ambitious but paradigm-shifting in returning spectacle and awe to sleepy institutions and public spaces.

Certainly I was overawed, almost giddy, but that might have had something to do with sleep deprivation.  The impressive courtyard of the red-brick building seems vaguely Chinese in its rooflines, but the interior is anchored by a glass tower that climbs six stories through the center and encloses the library of King George III.  From the surrounding staircases the various reading rooms (and dining areas) spin off.  Most of the 12 million books are stored underground, on 300 kilometers of shelving, which no doubt accounts for some of the inflated cost of construction (a problem the new Williams College Library has avoided in a manner that will be the subject of my next post.)

Despite the architectural pizzazz, the most immediately dazzling feature of the library is its public exhibition galleries.  While the building strides boldly into the future, the exhibitions look far back and world wide at the history of books.  Among the various manuscripts and volumes, I was particularly drawn to the talismanic quality of Jane Austen’s juvenilia and actual writing desk, displayed next to Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte’s own hand.  But no matter what your interests, even if they go back no further than the Beatles, you will find specimens of authenticity whose aura draws you in and takes you back.  There are virtual attractions as well, with touchscreens that simulate the experience of leafing through volumes like the Lindisfarne Gospels or Shakespeare’s First Folio.  I was transfixed like a teen in front of a game console at the arcade.  (And when I returned home, I discovered that Turning the Pages is available online.)

The exhibitions seemed emblematic of the contemporary library’s need to preserve the past while embracing the tools of the future.  Whatever the format or medium, there is a bibliographic imperative and bibliophilic spirit to be maintained.

Surprisingly, the British Library is a fairly recent institution, created in the last half-century out of many others, most importantly the book collections of the British Museum, where the famous Reading Room has now been restored as the centerpiece of the Great Court carved out of what used to be stack space and is now covered by Norman Foster’s millennial glass dome.  Unfortunately, the Reading Room itself was closed for the installation of an exhibit, so I couldn’t soak up the atmosphere of that fabled rotunda where so many world historical figures have studied, from Marx to Gandhi and beyond. 

In the default of really being there, one can have a virtual look around.  And as one of the visual icons of the new London, the Great Court and Reading Room of the British Museum can be viewed in great photographic variety on flickr.com.

Another reading room, similarly closed to visitors, is in the Radcliffe Camera, a domed rotunda from 1748, the focal point of the Bodleian Library, and indeed the whole campus of Oxford University.  Only fair, I suppose, that a reading room should be devoted to readers and not to gawkers.  The Bodleian itself is a centuries-old and ever-evolving institution, most of which is closed to those without a reader’s card, but our son’s ID got us into the spaces where visitors are allowed, the Divinity School of 1488 and Duke Humfrey’s Library, where the weight of ancient learning is exalting rather than oppressive.

I got little sense of the Bodleian’s operation as a modern library, with most of its closed stacks underground or across the street in the bunker-like, WWII-vintage New Bodleian (which might strike you as a misnomer, until you consider Oxford’s “New College” was founded in 1379), but what a presence is the central courtyard!  It certainly conveys the idea that a library is not simply a repository of dusty old books, but a glorious edifice of learning, an inspiration to think the highest and best that humans are capable of.

The entrance tower of circa 1620 is supported by columns of the five orders of architecture — Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite — and presided over by a statue of patron King James I.  Across the quadrangle are the Divinity School and Duke Humfrey’s Library.  The duke was Henry V’s brother and donated his books around 1440 — the pre-Gutenberg volumes were mostly dispersed during the iconoclastic phase of the English Reformation in 1550, but when Thomas Bodley restored and restocked the library around 1600, Duke Humfrey was memorialized in an ornate reading room, with old folios and quartos still chained to the shelves.

The Radcliffe Library was built as a separate entity in the 18th century, but was absorbed by the Bodleian a century later, in a process of consolidation that continued through the 19th and 20th centuries.  Whatever the Bodleian’s deficiencies as an exemplar of 21st century access to information, it certainly highlights the opposite (or complementary) mission of the library, as a repository of past knowledge and belief, and entry point on the long continuum of human learning.

You can start on the long odyssey — 215 years and counting — of libraries at Williams College, by clicking on the “History 01” tab at the top of this screen, or under “Pages” in the links at right.  I hope you enjoy reading the saga as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it, that it holds as many interesting and entertaining discoveries for you as it did for me.

One of the great pleasures of the process was reading the words of Professor Frederick Rudolph ’42, who was my indispensable source — indeed his were the words that made College history come alive for me.  For a bicentennial lecture series, he delivered an essay, “Williams College 1793-1993: Three Eras, Three Cultures,” included as an appendix in the 1996 reprint of Mark Hopkins and the Log.  I see my history of Eph’s libraries as an extension of his thesis there.

Prof. Rudolph defines three eras at Williams:  Christian college, gentleman’s college, consumer college.  And I believe the Library embodied each culture in a specific building:  Lawrence Hall, Stetson Hall, Sawyer Library.  (I’d amend “consumer” to “selective,” which better suggests the recent approach of both College and students.)  From this perspective, the synthesis sought in the Stetson-Sawyer project signals the emergence of a fourth identity for the College, which I would characterize provisionally as the institution of excellence.

Within these changes, Prof. Rudolph sees “singularity of purpose — the training of a governing elite — that is the history of Williams.”  Though stated with characteristic directness (and certainly leaving out such alums as myself), this seems a fair statement of the College’s aim, and we will see how it plays out in the construction of the New Sawyer Library.  

The College has just issued a new Report from Williams, which focuses on the Stetson-Sawyer project and displays the current plans. The Williams Record just published a tour of the North and South Academic Buildings, as they are approaching completion for opening next September, and recent construction photos are online. By June the off-site Library Shelving Facility is expected to open on schedule.  Chapin Library and College Archives have closed, with most of their collections going into storage until the new library building is finished in 2011, though interim spaces will open in the old Southworth Elementary School next September.  

Architectural historian Witold Rybczynski presents a slide show on Slate.com called “Borrowed Time,” which observes the new horizons of library building, and notes the recovery of key spaces like the grand reading room, which Stetson Hall had and will have, but which the existing Sawyer Library consciously omitted from its design.