New York, New York, USA
“A central circulating library must empower the community it serves,” states Francine Houben at Mecanoo.
“Here, the community is all New Yorkers. Super-charged with energy, diversity and hope, America’s greatest city deserves the best that a central circulating library can be.”
Won as the first place in a competition organized by The Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Mecanoo and Beyer Blinder Belle’s renovation of a Mid-Manhattan Library to create capacity for 400,000 books and other circulating materials; with children’s library, teens library, business library, adult learning centre, 1,580 m2 of general reading and study space, 1,020 m2 of multipurpose space, and rooftop terrace.
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library designed together with Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects is a new-generation library for all New Yorkers, with special facilities for young users, adult learning, and business.
It offers the perfect contemporary complement to NYPL’s world-famous Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (SASB), located across Fifth Avenue from SNFL. SASB opened in 1911, designed by architects Carrère & Hastings in a glorious Beaux-Art style, and receives over 1.7 million visits a year as the mothership of NYPL’s reference collections.
New features at library reflect this harmony between the buildings: long tables that recall the impressive scale of those in SASB’s Rose Main Reading Room, ceiling artwork in the Long Room that echoes the neoclassical paintings set in Schwarzman Building’s ceilings, and the use of classic materials including natural stone, terrazzo, and oak.
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library was awarded a 2022 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The Library has an annual circulation of two million items, and this sheer volume generates challenges in access, organization, and storage.
The design solution offers more space, more books, more seats, and lower shelves.
The ground floor is arranged around an internal street that runs beneath a floating linear canopy of wood beams, from the Fifth Avenue entrance to the welcome desks. Located on one side are elevators, stairs, and a mezzanine balcony.
On the other side, a rectangular opening in the floorplate reveals the lower ground floor, which houses a Children’s Library and Teen Center.
The Children’s Library play area enjoys natural light, and the Teen Center has a dedicated staircase and study and media rooms decorated with bold and whimsical commissioned murals by artist Melinda Beck.
An internal window on the lower ground floor allows visitors to see Library’s book-sorting machine in action.
The heart of the Library is the Long Room, a new space that truly brings the idea of a library into the old structure, which was originally designed as a department store.
This dramatic linear atrium separates three floors of flexible, daylit reading areas on one side and five levels of book stacks on the other, a creative and efficient solution to balancing the need for a browsable collection and the desire for more public reading room space.
“We really wanted to use the columns,” states Houben, referring to the building’s steel frame. A triple-height void has been cut into it, 9m (31 feet) wide and rising 26m (85 feet) from the second story to a vibrant new abstract ceiling artwork by Hayal Pozanti.
Above the Long Room, the fifth and sixth floors host the Business Center and the Pasculano Learning Center facilities.
The Library now delivers to the Midtown cityscape a sensational new public roof attraction and a striking sculptural addition.
Elevators and stairs continue to the seventh floor, which is built at the original building’s roof level. This new floor has pitched wood slat ceilings and contains a flexible 268-occupant conference and event center.
An L-shaped roof terrace runs above the 40th Street and Fifth Avenue facades and includes a roof garden and an adjacent indoor café.
It is Manhattan’s only free, publicly-accessible roof terrace and offers staggering Midtown views, including across Fifth Avenue to the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building and surrounding skyscrapers.
Above the seventh floor, a dramatic new roof slopes up to cover mechanical equipment, reaching 56m (184 feet) above street level.
Its angled pitches, and a patinated copper-colored aluminum surface, are inspired by Manhattan’s Beaux Art copper-clad mansard roofs, two 1904 examples of which are visible from the terrace.
As a new native New Yorker, the form also nods to the tapering spires of New York’s art deco skyscrapers and faceted facades of its newer towers.
Project: The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
Architects: Mecanoo Architecten
Architects of Record: Beyer Blinder Belle Architects
Original Architects: Carrère & Hasting (1911)
Landscape Architects: Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects PC.
Client: The Stavros Niarchos Foundation and New York City Public Library
Photographers: John Bartelstone, Max Touhey