A ‘Laboratory for the Humanities’ Gleams After a Book-Centric Renovation
“Architectural entropy” is what Ronald McCoy calls the process by which campus buildings lose beautiful spaces to program changes, office expansions, and infrastructure upgrades. McCoy, university architect at Princeton University for the past 11 years, has seen even great buildings “devolve,” as he puts it. But sometimes an opportunity comes along to reverse the damage.
In the case of Princeton’s 1948 Firestone Memorial Library, such an opportunity arose because security and safety issues required renovations. Everything else involved in a decade-long overhaul of the building, he says, arose out of the sense that, “OK, while we’re doing it, we should do it right.”
By “right,” McCoy says he means that Princeton wanted to avoid having a library with “an airport-lounge feel.” The ensuing renovation was done in seven phases, allowing the 430,000-square-foot building to remain in use while work continued.
Among the notable changes: Some staff members were moved out of the building, freeing up space. Sixty-year-old metal study carrels for undergraduates working on their senior projects were removed, as were private offices for emeritus faculty members. The rare-books collections were given larger, more secure spaces. Study “oases” with bright colors, generous tables, and comfortable reading chairs were carved out of the below-grade stacks. And an exhibit space was created off the lobby, across from a delightful children’s library with figures from popular storybooks.
The architecture firm Shepley Bulfinch had been hired for the project before McCoy came to Princeton, but he added Frederick Fisher and Partners to the team because, McCoy says, Fisher is “curious, passionate, and scholarly about Midcentury Modern.” Its Collegiate Gothic exterior notwithstanding, Firestone — originally designed by Robert B. O’Connor and Walter H . Kilham Jr. — is practically a museum of Midcentury design. Just inside the Gothic entrance is a glass curtain wall with stainless-steel details. Beyond are a handsome, wood-paneled lobby; a striking coffered ceiling with period light fixtures in the adjoining reading room; and a sleek main staircase of polished green stone.
“I had imagined a narrow scope for Fred,” McCoy says, but Fisher was enthusiastic and worked extensively with the Shepley Bulfinch team. He chose period-appropriate paint colors for key spaces and sought new Modernist-style chairs and tables for seating areas, but he also had study tables made to his own design. Fisher and other members of the project team devoted a lot of attention to organizing spaces in a way that makes such a large building navigable. For instance, a broad central spine occupies the same location on each floor, including the three below ground, and different colors identify each floor, with blues for floors above ground and tans and browns below.
The printed word remains the building’s focus, however. Just as a 1948 issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly heralded the introduction of open stacks as an “encouragement in the use of books,” the library remains a “laboratory for the humanities,” McCoy says, in which “there is still a lot of teaching around the physical artifact.” Roughly two million volumes are housed in Firestone; Princeton also has several other libraries, as well as a book-storage facility on its Forrestal campus that it shares with Columbia and Harvard Universities and the New York Public Library.
Still, books were not the project’s only concern. “We spent an immense amount of time on the number of seats,” McCoy says, and on how many should be at tables, in carrels, or be comfortable chairs in groups. Also, Princeton has pledged to cut its greenhouse-gas emissions to zero by 2046, and he says the Firestone renovation has made it “intensely energy efficient,” with motion sensors controlling most of the lighting and with a chilled-beam HVAC system. Best of all, fire-safety improvements that usually go unnoticed have garnered a lot of attention here: A spectacular tower room that had been off-limits for decades because it only has one exit is once again accessible, thanks to the addition of sprinklers.
McCoy won’t say what the project cost, although the Alumni Weekly cites a $165.6-million figure from a 2016 university document. What he will say, though, is that the project was “a lot of fun,” which is reflected in the results. If you’re in the area, by all means visit.
‘A Practical Guide’ to Planning for Institutional Energy Emissions
By coincidence, a team of former Princeton graduate students recently got in touch to offer a white paper on developing campus carbon-emission and energy-procurement plans.
Before they graduated, they had previously worked with the university’s facilities team to help them understand the impacts of energy-procurement options on the university’s carbon footprint. “We quickly discovered that all the resources available were quite complex and focused on very narrow areas,” writes Gregory L. Davies, who was a student in mechanical and aerospace engineering, “— and that there was nothing to give a high-level introduction to the many areas that need to be considered simultaneously when developing such a plan.”
Hence the team’s white paper, titled “Institutional Emissions and Energy Planning.” Davies says team members hope it will help other institutions that may be struggling with the details of carbon-reduction efforts.
The white paper warns that it can’t “anticipate all of the challenges and complexities that will arise” as colleges try to weigh their carbon-reduction options. What the paper can do, it says, is “introduce a structured way to approach plan development, and to highlight the types of issues that can be expected.” Others on the team were Ryan Edwards, Yao Lai, Bruce Perry, and Kasparas Spokas.
On Campuses and Beyond
While we’re on the subject of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions: Middlebury College sent an invitation to a groundbreaking ceremony next week, but it’s not for a routine campus building. Instead, it’s for an anaerobic digester that will “combine cow manure and food waste to produce locally-sourced renewable natural gas.” The digester, which will be located on the 1,000-cow Goodrich Family Farm in Salisbury, Vt., is a joint undertaking by the college, Vermont Gas, and a company called Vanguard Renewables. The digester will allow the college to supplement its existing biomass plant with renewable natural gas, rather than conventional natural gas.
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In a crunch — such as the one facing Virginia Tech, which has enrolled about 1,000 more students this fall than it had planned for — converting a hotel into a residence hall should be easy, right? For the college, maybe. But for students, there can be downsides. Read more.
A documentary project in the works at the College of Charleston will examine the roles of enslaved Africans in constructing the 249-year-old college’s buildings (above, Randolph Hall). The project will be called “If These Walls Could Talk.” Read more.
Illinois Central College is constructing a wetland “about as long as a football field” that will remove nitrate from runoff from 50 acres of farmland on the college’s East Peoria campus. Read more.
The newest complex at the U. of Illinois at Chicago (above) combines a 548-bed residence hall with a 54,000-square-foot academic center and “evokes the original campus design by architect Walter Netsch.” But this time around the design is by Solomon Cordwell Buenz. Read more.
