Центральная библиотека Йельского университета: История и архитектура

Main library building of the Yale University Library
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. Rogers' work on a "General Plan" for the Yale campus allowed him to incorporate the main library project into his neo Gothic scheme for Yale's expansion. Roger's campus plan called for the library to sit on a new main courtyard, now called Cross Campus. Originally, he planned to balance the courtyard with a 5,000 seat chapel facing opposite the library. With the end of compulsory undergraduate chapel services in 1926 and the lack of a financier, the chapel was never built. Expanding on Goodhue's tower concept, Rogers proposed the library take the form of a cathedral, which, in his own words, would be "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 exterior and interior. The library's footprint would take up more than half a city block. 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 the final holdout homeowner agreed to sell. While the new library was planned and constructed, Yale 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. The bible 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. 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 asserted that the project was either sanctimonious or sacrilegious for merging academic purpose and religious architecture.

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 it 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. It is elaborately decorated with stone and wood carving, ironwork, stained glass windows, and ceiling bosses. 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". Although encased in a Gothic exterior, the tower's structural system is a welded steel frame, which permits a vertical rise that traditional Gothic techniques would not. The crenelated roof of the tower is elaborately decorated, complete with a castle like housing for air handling equipment. The tower's shelves are estimated to stretch 80 mile (129 km), contained within 6.5 mile (10 km) of aisles. In addition to the library collections, the tower houses reading rooms, study carrels, library offices, and special collections, including the Babylonian Collection. The Periodical Reading Room, lined with oak shelves like those of the main reading room, is reached through from a vestibule on the north side of the nave. The room can hold 1,800 periodicals and features windows decorated with signs of the zodiac to symbolize periodicity. The tower holds smaller reading rooms for the library's area studies holdings, including African, East Asian, Latin American, Near East, Slavic and East European, Southeast Asian, and Judaica collections. There are also dedicated reading rooms for several fields of study, including American Studies, History, and Philosophy.

Sterling's northern wing, accessed from the nave via a cloister hallway, contains the library's offices as well as three major rooms: a lecture hall, the Memorabilia Room, and the Rare Book Room. The Memorabilia Room hosts temporary exhibitions of Yale's archival collections and university history, and serves as an antechamber to the 120 seat lecture hall. The Rare Book Room, designed after English Jacobean architecture, was built to allow library patrons to browse Yale's collection of rare books and manuscripts. In 1997, the western courtyard was enclosed and renovated to become the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library.

The library is one of the most elaborate buildings on the Yale campus. Rogers commissioned artisans, including stained glass artist G. Owen Bonawit and blacksmith Samuel Yellin, who worked with Rogers on many of his buildings, sculptor Rene Paul Chambellan, and painter Eugene Savage. The building's exterior is decorated with stone gargoyles, reliefs, and inscriptions. Savage, an expert in Early Renaissance techniques, painted the mural in his characteristic style, an Art Deco interpretation of traditional Renaissance composition. Surrounding "Alma Mater" are personifications of academic disciplines. Eighty decorate the nave, depicting scenes from the history of Yale and New Haven. Most reading rooms have stained glass panels that represent themes from their subject matter. Several tributes in the library commemorate pioneering graduates of the university. A portrait of Edward Bouchet, one of Yale's earliest African American graduates, hangs in the nave's transept. Near the Franke Family Reading Room is a statue of Yung Wing, the first Chinese graduate of Yale. In 2016 a portrait of the first seven women to receive Ph. D. s from Yale, which those seven women all did in 1894, was placed in the library. The women include Mary Augusta Scott, Elizabeth Deering Hanscom, Margaretta Palmer, Charlotte Fitch Roberts, Cornelia H. B. Rogers, Sara Bulkley Rogers, and Laura Johnson Wylie.]] The large majority of materials in Sterling are housed in the bookstacks, which are contained in the building's tower. The bookstacks use two classification systems: the Yale Library system and the Library of Congress system. Adopted in the 1890s, the non standard Yale system became cumbersome and inefficient for cataloging. Though replaced in 1970 by the Library of Congress system, many of the 5.7 million volumes held by the library at that time remain filed in the Yale system. The card catalogs in the nave once contained as many as 9.5 million cards, sorted in 8,700 trays. Though the archive uses the former Rare Book Room as its primary reading room, most of the collection is held off site. Significant materials within Manuscripts & Archives include the papers of Charles Lindbergh, Eero Saarinen, Eli Whitney, John Maley and the audio library of Osama bin Laden. The archives hosts a notable collection of diplomatic papers, including those of Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, Henry Stimson, and Cyrus Vance.

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, a project founded in 1954 to collect and publish all the papers of Benjamin Franklin. The library received a major donation of Franklin's papers when Sterling opened in 1935, and the collection formed the basis of Yale professor Edmund Morgan's best selling biography of Franklin. The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, a collection of about 4,500 video recorded testimonies from witness and survivors of the Holocaust, deposited in the library in 1981. Boswell Editions, an edited collection of the papers and publications of Scottish lawyer James Boswell, the major biographer of the famous 18th century English literary figure Samuel Johnson. Wing STC Revision Project, an effort begun in 1933 by Yale librarian Donald Wing to compile a Short Title Catalogue, a bibliographic reference for books printed in England and its colonies between 1641 and 1700.