Duo Dickinson Photo
The library, before reopening.
Set to reopen to the public Sept. 6, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, built not only to house books but to glory in their beauty and physical presence, is at a crossroads. Will the stacks, designed as a celebratory exhibit in a glass inner cube for all who enter, take on a different life in an increasingly digital age?
When Yale’s Beinecke Library opened in 1963 it was a unique effort, completely funded in its construction, stewardship and mission by William Beinecke and his family. Something was very different about this project: It broke, radically, from the campus’ architectural tradition.
Its radically modernist presence enfolded with the Neoclassical arms of Woolsey Hall and the Yale Commons. Its architecture was as unique as its single payer provenance. The building’s cubism as designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, floated above a new starkly Modernist plaza.
It was a time of great changes for Yale: soon to admit women, soon to become one of the great quilts of midcentury modernist architecture tour de force buildings. And this new monument on the campus spoke right to it.
But that was 1963, and this is 2016. Back then, curators smoked at their desks; a small fire once erupted when the inaugural director flicked a lighted cigarette into his wastebasket. Books were the only way information was catalogued, disseminated and cross-referenced.
Today almost no one smokes anywhere. The printed word is where we find leisure reading, not serious academic research. Libraries are changing in wholistic ways that have nothing to do with books.
How will the once-modern building maintain its balance? Gutenberg Bibles and Shakespeare folios are still sacred cultural icons, but now the printed word itself is beginning to become arcane, and the Beinecke’s 54-year-old cutting edge is having its edge radically resharpened by cultural and technological realities completely independent of its bold beginnings.
Will the $73 million dollar, self-funded renovation bring about productive new technologies? Will it slowly strangle the practical utility of bound books to death into the marble, glass and steel 3D Joseph Albers art piece wrought by Bunshaft in 1963?
To hear more about the Beinecke, click on or download the audio above, or catch it as a podcast on “WNHH Arts Mix” on Soundcloud or iTunes.