Louis I. Kahn: The Library at Phillips Exeter Academy

Completed in in Exeter, United States. In Louis I. Kahn was commissioned by the Phillips Exeter Academy to design a library for the.
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From the outside it looks like a cube made of bricks, upon entering, between the plates that make up the cube, it was discovered recently that at almost any time of day the building is under shadow, evoking a cave-like feeling.

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Such access leads to a central area of the height of the building defined by a series of Euclidean shapes circles, triangles and squares and the expressiveness of their material, coated by an apparent indirect light, which evokes the emotion of what is elementary. The seriousness of this mystery whose interior is accentuated by the transition from dark to light, gives life to the building and the pursuit of knowledge as a spiritual project.


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Although the facades have an almost elemental nature, the interior volumes, the massive geometries reveal the influence of the overall design of Kahn for the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh , commissioned in and completed after his death. In the second, third and fourth floor are cubicles for private reading, arranged around the perimeter of the building, which are located in the spaces between the pillars of brick are the reference lines of the horizontal windows of each cubicle, which are then articulated in the facade.

Structure The library of the Phillips Exeter Academy has a large empty volume, a definitive feature that created by Kahn. While the plan and the section of this empty space offers a cavernous point, The interior space is in fact incredibly complex. A limited-edition handmade box set that includes 4 notebooks in 4 different shades of BLUE.


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    Library at Phillips Exeter Academy

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    Kahn calls this fact to the viewer's attention by making the brick piers noticeably thicker at the bottom where they have more weight to bear. The windows are correspondingly wider toward the top where the piers are thinner.

    Louis I. Kahn. Library, Philip Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, 1965-1971

    The corners of the building are chamfered cut off , allowing the viewers to see the outer parts of the building's structure, the outer "doughnut. At the top of the exterior walls is a row of openings similar to the windows below except that these openings are above the roof and have no glass. Another arcade circles the building on the ground floor. Kahn disliked the idea of a building that was dominated by its entrance, so he concealed the main entrance to the library behind this arcade.

    His original design, however, called for landscaping with a paved forecourt that would have indicated the entrance without disrupting the symmetry of the facade. A circular double staircase built from concrete and faced with travertine greets the visitor upon entry into the library.

    At the top of the stairs the visitor enters a dramatic central hall with enormous circular openings that reveal several floors of book stacks. At the top of the atrium, two massive concrete cross beams diffuse the light entering from the clerestory windows. Carter Wiseman, author of Louis Kahn: Beyond Time and Style , said, "The many comparisons of the experience of entering Exeter's main space to that of entering a cathedral are not accidental. Kahn clearly wanted the students to be humbled by the sense of arrival, and he succeeded.

    Louis I. Kahn: The Library at Phillips Exeter Academy

    Salk was a temple for science. Dhaka was a temple for government. Exeter was a temple for learning. Because the stacks are visible from the floor of the central hall, the layout of the library is clear to the visitor at a glance, which was one of the goals the academy's building committee had set for Kahn. The central room is 52 feet Those dimensions approximate a ratio known as the golden ratio , which was studied by the ancient Greeks and has been considered the ideal architectural ratio for centuries.

    The circle and the square that are combined so dramatically in the atrium were considered to be the paradigmatic geometric units by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius. The specifications of the academy's building committee called for a large number of carrels the library has [8] and for the carrels to be placed near windows so they could receive natural light. The placement of carrel spaces at the periphery was the product of thinking that began years earlier when Kahn submitted proposals for a new library at Washington University. There he dispensed with the traditional arrangement of completely separate library spaces for books and readers, usually with book stacks on the periphery of the library and reading rooms toward the center.

    Instead he felt that reading spaces should be near the books and also to natural light. A library begins that way. He will not go fifty feet away to an electric light.


    • Introduction.
    • Louis Kahn’s Class of 1945 Library: Phillips Exeter Academy!
    • Description.
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    • The book stacks also look out into the atrium. The inherent massiveness of the brick "plate-wall" structure of the outer part of the library helps to create the cloistered atmosphere that Kahn felt was appropriate for library carrels. Wall-bearing masonry construction with its niches and vaults has the appealing structural order to provide naturally such spaces.

      Architectural experts sometimes differ in their interpretations of Kahn's design. For example, in reasoning why the cross beams at the clerestory windows above the atrium are so massive, Carter Wiseman says, "While they appear to be—and indeed are—structural, they are far deeper than necessary; their no-less-important role was to diffuse the sunlight coming in from the surrounding clerestory windows and reflect it down into the atrium.

      Its weight, which appears ready to come crashing down upon the onlooker, revives the sense of threat dissipated elsewhere by the reassuring familiarity of the brick skin and wood details. Another issue is the extent to which Kahn deliberately introduced elements into some of his buildings that give them the ageless atmosphere of ruins. Kahn himself spoke of "wrapping ruins around buildings", although in the context of another project. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome", Vincent Scully argues that Kahn followed this practice in several of his buildings, including this library, saying, "And in his library at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Kahn won't even let it become a building; he wants it to remain a ruin.

      The walls don't connect at the top. They remain like a hollow shell". In it, while discussing the arrangement of exterior components of Kahn's National Assembly Building of Bangladesh , Giurgola wrote, "This relationship with daylight was the determining element behind this solution, rather than the formal desire to 'create ruins,' as some critics have suggested.

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