Library Buildings around the World

The exterior is clad in precast concrete with deep, shelf-like openings into which are set aluminum sun-shading louvers scheduled to
be added in late 2010. Oriented vertically on the east and west façades, and horizontally on the south façade, the louvers are situated
to balance outward views with maximum shading to reduce heat gain to the interiors. On the roof, an open-air amphitheater
overhangs the atrium, with a full-height clerestory on three sides that admits natural light into the building. The amphitheater
provides additional teaching and program space in temperate weather, and wide, unobstructed views of the midtown Manhattan
skyline. (Viñoly)
Brown University, Watson Institute for International Studies, Providence, RI – USA 2002
2002 5,017 m²
The Watson Institute evolved from Thomas J. Watson Jr.’s vision of a research and teaching center that would address the most
pressing global problems of the day. It promotes the work of students, faculty, visiting scholars and policy makers who analyze
contemporary global problems and develop initiatives to address them.
The program includes offices for researchers, an extensive library, classroom space for international relations courses, and larger
conference spaces for seminars and lectures.
The latest telecommunications facilities have been designed into the building in order to integrate its users with events occurring
around the world. Initial space assessments for the new structure allowed for a significant increase in available square footage to
accommodate research programs and growth in the number of visitors to the Institute.
Originally dispersed across five locations on the Brown University campus, the Watson Institute is now consolidated on a site near
its center. It is the first building in a new academic quadrangle being developed by the university. The design seeks to maximize
interaction among research groups, mainly by organizing circulation in a triple-height atrium that runs nearly the entire length of
the block-long site and bathes the interior in natural light.
The spaces that make up the shared resource “pods” of the program are on one side of the atrium. (Viñoly)
Oxford University Masterplan, Oxford – UK 2009
In the heart of Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world has created what one don calls a “desert”. Apart
from three listed buildings, the former Radcliffe Infirmary site has been razed, leaving an expanse of bare earth interrupted
only by mounds of rubble, danger signs and yellow mechanical diggers. But next Wednesday, the first three elements of the
site’s rebirth — as envisioned by masterplanner Rafael Viñoly — go to Oxford City Council’s strategic development
committee. The old outpatients wing is to be remodelled for the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, the main infirmary
building will be refurbished — probably for the university’s central administration — and a new housing block, designed by
Niall McLaughlin, will be built for the adjacent. Sommerville College. It should be an exciting moment, yet amid the quads
and manicured college lawns, many of Oxford’s congenitally sceptical dons fear the university may be embarking on an
expensive folly. Occupying a 4ha slice of central Oxford, sandwiched between Somerville and Green Templeton colleges, the
site has long been on the university’s wishlist. In 2003 it finally bought the land from the NHS and the last of the health
facilities moved to the new John Radcliffe Hospital in Headington. A masterplan by Viñoly followed, aimed at opening up
views of the 18th century Radcliffe Observatory at the northern end of the site and creating new buildings for maths, a
newly created humanities division and a new Institute for Public Policy paid for by a secret billionaire donor, who BD can
now reveal is the Russian-American oligarch Leonard Blavatnik. William Whyte, a fellow of St John’s College who is
writing an architectural history of red brick universities, accepts that some of the new buildings are necessary. “It’s a
funding issue,” he says. “The university gets more and more of its money from research and the only way you can increase
that is through more space.” But, he adds, this only takes one so far. “They’ve got a huge yawning site and need to find ways
of filling it. So they’ve folded in a whole number of other things like library space and seminar rooms which are already well
provided for.” Another reason for the expansive Viñoly masterplan was to avoid the horrors of Oxford’s post-war science
buildings, which are an “absolute mess” due to bad planning. But masterplans can create their own problems, Whyte warns.
“You wonder about combining architects and masterplanners as you can end up with something extremely homogeneous.
You can promise that the masterplan is going to be infinitely flexible but it’s never quite true.” Like many of his fellow dons,
Whyte says that symbolism is just as important as practical considerations. He thinks that Oxford has looked enviously to
Cambridge where the university departments matter more than the colleges, thanks to modern campuses like the Sidgwick
site which houses the arts faculties. Partly as a result, Oxford University, for so long in a losing battle for recognition with its
well endowed colleges, is hitting back with the Viñoly masterplan. “It’s a public demonstration — we are a modern
university with modern departments,” Whyte says.
But what of the buildings themselves? Insiders says that the Viñoly-designed maths building has been changed into a series
of smaller “pavilions”. Meanwhile the humanities building designed by Bennetts Associates has raised eyebrows because of
its underground library. Rick Mather, who has a project across the road at Keble College, will not be drawn on the Viñoly
plan’s overall merits but describes the humanities building as a “shopping centre”. The chairman of the council’s strategic
development committee, Roy Darke, wonders about the lack of architectural flair. “It could end up being very boxy, uniform
in height, undramatic architecturally. You could end up with monotony and the worst case scenario is a sixties office block.”
He is pushing for changes to be made to the building’s atrium. “They’re trying to create a big atrium that will go down two
storeys and look towards the observatory and have a library in there. I think they could be more sculptural and thoughtful
about what that’s like.” Geoffrey Tyack, a fellow of Kellogg College and author of Oxford: An Architectural Guide, says
there have been few successful modern buildings in Oxford, with most of the adventurous ones coming not from the
university but from the colleges. “There’s a tendency in any big organisation to cut themselves off from what going on, and
build castles in the air,” he says. “I think there’s a little bit of this going on here. Like so much contemporary educational
architecture it could be very dull and ordinary.” Richard Wentworth, outgoing head of the Ruskin school of art, believes
Oxford is in thrall to a faux ancientness which is actually Victorian in origin.He believes it has once again missed an
opportunity to be modern: “Finding the content for the infirmary site should be a major European project, celebrating the
fugitive or migratory experience of ‘now’, not clutching at old cushions and trying to plump them up,” he says. The most
secretive and controversial element of the site is the Blavatnik-funded building for the new Institute of Public Policy. The
building is mired in uncertainty and paranoid secrecy after a design competition shortlisted five architects: Dixon Jones,
Make, John Simpson & Partners, Stanhope Gate and Wilkinson Eyre. Insiders say the university had narrowed it down to
two but was unable to decide between the traditionalist design of John Simpson and the more modern Dixon Jones
proposal. Amid growing confusion, a public exhibition of the designs was cancelled at the eleventh hour before it emerged
that Robert Stern, dean of Yale’s architecture faculty, had been parachuted in to bring fresh thinking — a move greeted
with incredulity by many of the shortlisted teams. The plot has since thickened further.
“Oxford hated his designs and Stern is now being presented as a political rather than architectural figure,” one architect
comments. Another says: “I’m hopping mad because you put a lot of time, money and effort in and hear nothing.”He adds
that the delay has been caused because Blavatnik is more preoccupied by the world’s money markets than “a series of
designs that he isn’t getting particularly excited by”. Sadly no one at Oxford’s estates department or at Stern’s architecture
practice in New York will comment on the competition. Rafael Viñoly Architects also declined to comment, and the
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