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Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library

By : Mecanoo and Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners

GRANDS PRIX DU DESIGN – 15th edition

Discipline : Architecture : Grand Winner

Categories : Public Building / Cultural Building : Gold Certification

SNFL 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 SNFL 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 neo-classical paintings set in SASB’s ceilings, and the use of classic materials including natural stone, terrazzo, and oak. SNFL has an annual circulation of two million items, and this sheer volume generates challenges in access, organization, and storage.

SNFL’s 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 design solution offers more space, more books, more seats, and lower shelves. 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.

Above the Long Room, the fifth and sixth floors host the Business Center and the Pasculano Learning Center facilities. SNFL 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 copperclad 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.

Collaboration

Architect : Mecanoo

Architect : Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners

The project in images

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Photo credit : John Bartelstone

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Photo credit : John Bartelstone

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Photo credit : John Bartelstone

Filter: Architecture, Culture/Entertainment, Design Place, Public Building

See other pictures of the project

Photo credit : Max Touhey

Filter: Architecture, Culture/Entertainment, Design Place, Public Building

See other pictures of the project

Photo credit : Max Touhey

Filter: Architecture, Culture/Entertainment, Design Place, Public Building

See other pictures of the project

Photo credit : John Bartelstone

Filter: Architecture, Culture/Entertainment, Design Place, Public Building

See other pictures of the project

Photo credit : John Bartelstone

Filter: Architecture, Culture/Entertainment, Design Place, Public Building

See other pictures of the project

Photo credit : John Bartelstone

Filter: Architecture, Culture/Entertainment, Design Place, Public Building

See other pictures of the project

Photo credit : Max Touhey

Filter: Architecture, Culture/Entertainment, Design Place, Public Building

See other pictures of the project

Photo credit : John Bartelstone

Filter: Architecture, Culture/Entertainment, Design Place, Public Building

See other pictures of the project

Photo credit : John Bartelstone

Filter: Architecture, Culture/Entertainment, Design Place, Public Building

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