The new Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library celebrated its opening on June 1st, 2021. Designed by Francine Houben of Mecanoo and Beyer Blinder Belle, the reopening of New York Public Library’s largest circulating branch after undergoing a full-scale renovation, where the building is the essence of what a library should be: beautiful, modern, inspiring, but also functional and classic.

Built within the 1914 shell and steel frame of the Mid-Manhattan Library which it replaces, the 16,722 m² (180,000 sq. ft.) building is topped with a spectacular angular roof and public roof-top amenities to make a new urban icon on Fifth Avenue.
 
“Libraries are the most important public buildings of all. A central circulating library must empower the community it serves. Here, the community is all New Yorkers. Supercharged with energy, diversity, and hope, America’s greatest city deserves the best that a central circulating library can be. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library is a powerhouse of wisdom, and its street presence brings drama and magic to Manhattan, visibly expressed with its Wizard Hat’.”
Francine Houben, principal of Mecanoo.
Mecanoo and Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners revitalize the building, designing 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. 

Mecanoo and Beyer Blinder Belle’s concept was to leverage the synergy of SNFL and SASB and bring them together as The New York Public Library’s Midtown Campus.

Description of project by Mecanoo and Beyer Blinder Belle

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL) is New York’s new central circulating library, designed by Dutch architecture firm Mecanoo in collaboration with Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners. Built within the 1914 shell and steel frame of the Mid-Manhattan Library which it replaces, the 16,722 m2 (180,000 sq. ft.) building is topped with a spectacular angular roof and public rooftop amenities to make a new urban icon on Fifth Avenue. 

Creating a library campus in Midtown

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. 

Mecanoo and Beyer Blinder Belle’s concept was to leverage the synergy of SNFL and SASB and bring them together as NYPL’s Midtown Campus. 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. 

Mecanoo and Beyer Blinder Belle have collaborated on programming and design across both locations from start to finish. Mecanoo led the design stages and Beyer Blinder Belle led the historic preservation, acted as architect of record, and designed the environmental graphics.

Francine Houben, principal of Mecanoo, declares that “libraries are the most important public buildings of all”. This is reinforced in SNFL’s open, humanistic design and inclusive program, which resonates with NYPL’s mission “to fight ignorance, and provide New Yorkers with the tools that they need to foster a better understanding of each other across racial and all other divides”.


“Now more than ever, New York City needs its great institutions for support and community. The new SNFL will provide both, in a building that is revitalized to provide 21st-century library services.” 

Elizabeth Leber, partner at Beyer Blinder Belle.


A vertical library with a welcoming ‘street’ and an airy atrium

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 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 SNFL’s book-sorting machine in action. 

SNFL 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 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. “We really wanted to use the columns”, comments 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. 

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. Book stacks are a vertical means of storing books dating back to the nineteenth century, and here they are revived to give open access for library users. Through the library’s 40th Street windows, passers-by will see the northern end of the book stacks, visible as a continuous vertical wall of book spines welcoming New Yorkers into the space to browse.  

The Long Room’s atrium wall at the southern end is deep red and perforated with new windows to bring the light from a pocket park to the south. Its distinctive look assists wayfinding. Ramps gently slope to connect the different floor heights of the book stack levels and reading areas. The reading areas extend from the atrium to the Fifth Avenue facade and have bespoke reading tables assembled in situ, many supported by the building’s original steel frame. These oak-surfaced tables stretch up to 20 meters (66 feet) in length. Readers at these tables sit in chairs designed in collaboration with Thos. Moser exclusively for NYPL branch libraries. 

Above the Long Room, the fifth and sixth floors host the Business Center and the Pasculano Learning Center facilities. As Houben states, “SNFL’s vertical arrangement of programs improves the user experience and journey of learning”. The materiality of the library contributes to that user experience, for example in terrazzo flooring and travertine presented in the elevator banks. 

A roof terrace and ‘Wizard Hat’ above Fifth Avenue 

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 sky-scrapers.

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. Francine Houben declared this spectacular roof to be ‘a Wizard Hat for all New Yorkers!’

A powerhouse of wisdom
 

"A central circulating library must empower the community it serves. Here, the community is all New Yorkers. Supercharged with energy, diversity, and hope, America’s greatest city deserves the best that a central circulating library can be. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library is a powerhouse of wisdom, and its street presence brings drama and magic to Manhattan, visibly expressed with its Wizard Hat".

Houben. 

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16,722 sqm.- 1,580 sqm. of general reading and study space, 1,020 sqm. of multipurpose space, and rooftop terrace.

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Project Design.- 2015 - 2018. Project Realization.- 2017 - 2021.

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455 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016, USA.

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Francine Houben (Holland 1955) began formulating the three fundamentals of her lifelong architectural vision while studying at the Delft University of Technology. It was in this crucible of higher learning that she began an architectural practice with two fellow students with the design of a groundbreaking social housing development. As a result, she graduated as architect with cum laude honours in 1984 and officially founded Mecanoo architecten with these same partners.

Francine has remained true to her architectural vision, Composition, Contrast, Complexity throughout her career. Always looking for inspiration and the secret of a specific location, Francine bases her work on both analyses and intuition. She enjoys interweaving social, technical, playful and humane aspects together in order to form a unique solution to each situation. Francine Houben combines the disciplines of architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture in an untraditional way; with sensitivity for light and beauty.

Her use of material is expressive. She is known as one of the most prolific architects in Europe today. Her wide-ranging portfolio comprises an intimate chapel built on the foundations of a former 19th century chapel in Rotterdam (2001) to Europe’s largest library in Birmingham (2013). Francine Houben’s work reveals a sensory aspect determined by form and space, a lavish use or subtle combinations of the most diverse materials, as well as planes of saturated colour. Francine’s contribution to the profession of architecture is widely recognized. She was granted lifelong membership to the Akademie der Künste, Berlin in 2010.

In 2008, she received the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year Award. Honorary fellowships to the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, and an international fellowship to the Royal Institute of British Architects were granted to her in previous years. The past three decades have seen her cumulative effect on the profession of architecture. Francine lectures all over the world and takes part as a jury member in prestigious competitions.

Her commitment to research and education is evidenced in her instatement as professor in Architecture, Chair of Aesthetics of Mobility at the Delft University of Technology (2000), her professorship at the Universitá della Svizzera Italiania, Accademia di architettura, Switzerland (2000) and her appointment as visiting professor at Harvard (2007). Dedication to her alma mater is reflected in generous sponsorship of the UfD-Mecanoo Award for the best graduating student of the Delft University of Technology.

Francine Houben lives in Rotterdam, a modern city where the skyline is dotted with buildings designed by world renowned architects; including her award winning Montevideo Skyscraper (2005). It was in this dynamic city that she directed and curated the First International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (2003), with the theme, ‘Mobility, a room with a view’. She has realised numerous signature projects throughout the Netherlands and Europe including Philips Business Innovation Centre, FiftyTwoDegrees in Nijmegen, (2005-2006), La Llotja Theatre and Conference Centre in Lleida, Spain (2009) and the Delft University of Technology Library (1999). Currently, she is expanding her architectural vision to other continents with the design of Taiwan’s largest theatre complex, The Wei-Wu-Ying Center for the Arts in Kaohsiung (2014), Dudley Municipal Center in Boston (USA) and Shenzhen Cultural Center (China). In 2011 the book Dutch Mountains was released, a chronicle of Francine Houben and eight special projects in five different countries.

Francine maintains an active presence in academia and culture, regularly publishing and giving lectures worldwide. She has performed in many academic and professional capacities throughout her career, including Chair of Architecture and Aesthetics of Mobility at Delft University of Technology, visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design, and as director of the First International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam.

Francine has received honorary fellowships from the Royal Institute of British Architects, the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. In 2014 Francine was named Woman Architect of the Year by the Architects’ Journal and in November 2015 Queen Máxima of The Netherlands presented Francine with the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prize for her wide-ranging career. Francine was awarded Honorary Doctorates from the Université de Mons, Belgium (2017) and the Utrecht University (2016).

“Architecture must appeal to all the senses. Architecture is never a purely intellectual, conceptual, or visual game alone. Architecture is about combining all the individual elements into a single concept. What counts in the end is the arrangement of form and emotion.”

Francine Houben, architect/creative director Mecanoo Architecten.

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Beyer Blinder Belle was founded in 1968 by John H. Beyer, Richard Blinder, and John Belle, in the wake of the urban renewal movement in the United States, when the social fabric of cities, communities, and buildings was compromised by the prevailing attitudes about planning and architecture. 

They pioneered and defined a different approach to the design of the built environment that focused on architecture empowering people — their interaction with each other on streets and in neighborhoods, their pleasure in moving through the city, and their connections to the surrounding physical fabric.

The founding partners John Belle, Richard Blinder, and John Beyer established the guiding values and principles that have anchored Beyer Blinder Belle's practice for more than five decades.
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Published on: June 1, 2021
Cite: "A new-generation library. Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library by Mecanoo and Beyer Blinder Belle" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/a-new-generation-library-stavros-niarchos-foundation-library-mecanoo-and-beyer-blinder-belle> ISSN 1139-6415
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