Phillips Exeter Academy Library

Louis Kahn – Phillips Exeter Academy Library, New Hampshire USA, 1965-1971

Phillips Exeter Academy Library is a library that serves Phillips Exeter Academy, an independent college located in Exeter, New Hampshire. It is the largest secondary school library in the world, containing 160,000 volumes on nine levels with a shelf capacity of 250,000 volumes.
When it became clear in the 1950s that the library had passed its existing building, the school initially hired an architect who proposed a traditional project for the new building. Deciding instead to build a library with a contemporary design, the school handed the commission to Louis Kahn in 1965. The library opened in 1971.
The library has an almost cubic shape: each of its four sides is 33 meters wide and 24 meters high. It is built in three concentric areas (which Kahn calls "donuts") In the words of Robert McCarter, author of Louis I. Kahn, "From the beginning of the design process, Kahn conceived the three types of spaces as if they were three buildings built with different materials and different scales – buildings-inside-buildings ". The outdoor area, which houses the reading rooms, is made of bricks. The middle area, which contains the heavy stacks of books, is made of reinforced concrete. The interior area is an atrium.