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Donald Maurice Kreis
If you liked Las Vegas, you're going to love Berry
Library.
In fact, if your purpose is to evaluate Dartmouth's
new, $55.5 million addition to the library facility at the heart
of the Hanover campus to decide whether it is a great or even just
a good building, this would be a great time to head for Nevada,
clutching a copy of Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi and
Denise Scott-Brown, the famous Philadelphia architectural duo who
are the project's lead designers. This is a lousy time to check
out Berry itself, as Venturi himself is quick to insist.
As undergraduates and faculty come pouring into the
building, Venturi and Scott-Brown don't mind so much that two buildings
slated for demolition - Kiewit and Gerry - are literally kissing
the front of the arcade that forms the key architectural gesture
of Berry's main facade, thoroughly compromising its visual effect.
Nor does it bother them that a whole wing of the Berry project -
Carson Hall, slated to be home to Dartmouth's History Department
- remains to be built, leaving Berry looking almost as if it was
extruded from some kind of giant machine and abruptly sliced off,
like Play-Doh or molten steel.
Venturi's concern, rather, is that this largest building
project in Dartmouth's history will be evaluated at a time when
the architectural element that is at the heart of his design - the
library's interior "main street" - does not even begin
to achieve its grand purpose of providing a campus thoroughfare
linking the Dartmouth Green with the new (and, so far, largely unbuilt)
North Campus that Scott Brown, the planning guru in the partnership,
made the centerpiece of the master plan that Dartmouth commissioned
from Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates several years ago. Instead,
the grand promenade begins at the Berry arcade, sweeps gloriously
up the stairs and terminates unceremoniously in some temporary drywall
with a dwarfish door to a jury-rigged passageway connecting Berry
to the old Baker Library to the south.
Evaluating Berry now is a little like reviewing a
subway system after only one station is finished.
Fortunately, though, this is a great time to read
up on Berry's architects. Venturi, in particular, has what is probably
contemporary American architecture's most prolific pens. When Venturi
won the Pritzker Prize, the architectural equivalent of a Nobel,
in 1991, the jury noted that his 1996 book Complexity and Contradiction
in Architecture "diverted the mainstream of architecture away
from modernism."
"I am for messy vitality over obvious unity,"
Venturi said in the 1966 manifesto, written when the world adored
the steel and glass boxes of architects like Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe, whose trademark aphorism was "less is more."
"Blatant simplification means bland architecture,"
Venturi countered. "Less is a bore."
Then, in 1972, partners Venturi, Scott-Brown and Stephen
Izenour came out with Learning from Las Vegas, which conveyed the
heretical thesis that a gaudy, commercial strip in the desert, created
for the ignoble purpose of depriving gamblers of their money, could
yield architectural insights that might be of use, say, when designing
a centerpiece building at one of the nation's great citadels of
higher knowledge.
So when you are next seated in one of the vast, grey
expanses of Berry, bathed in fluorescent rather than natural light,
disoriented by ceiling fixtures and compact shelving that seem to
point in random directions, hemmed in by low ceilings, perhaps wondering
what ever became of expansive and inspiring reading rooms of yesteryear
like the one in the New York Public Library or even the adjacent
Baker, you will perhaps draw comfort that you - meaning the Dartmouth
College community - were warned. Consider, for example, this discussion
in Learning from Las Vegas of the "big, low space" that
is the typical gambling casino: "[B]ig high spaces do not automatically
make architectural monumentality. . . . The lighting of the casino
achieves a new monumentality for the low space. The controlled sources
of artificial and colored light within the dark enclosures expand
and unify the space by obscuring its physical limits. You are no
longer in the bounded piazza but in the twinkling lights of the
city at night."
Twenty-eight years later, "new monumentality"
has morphed into a conviction that the soaring spaces one typically
associates with a library are worse that superfluous. "The
idea of a dramatic atrium is becoming a bore," Venturi maintained
in a recent interview. Instead, "the thrill is going to come
from the activity that goes on along the way."
Dartmouth's library should be "a communal place
on campus," Venturi explains. "It's also a communication
place." His vision is that of Berry as a crossroads, with students
and faculty meandering up and down the east-west arcade at the front
of the building, through the north-south passageway between Baker
and Berry connecting North Campus to the Green. The local precedent
is obviously the Hopkins Center, which functions not merely as the
arts hub for Dartmouth but also as a lively passageway linking Lebanon
Street to the Dartmouth Green.
Venturi and Scott-Brown speak of the "generic
loft" as their architectural template for the 21st Century.
Venturi is proud that Berry, from some angles, "almost looks
like a factory." To the architects, the generic loft is the
appropriate model because it can accommodates change. There are
few load-bearing walls within the vast expanses of Berry's floor
plate; the intention is very much to allow form to evolve with function
as technology drives changes in the needs of library users. "I
like to say it's in the tradition of the great loft buildings of
Manchester, New Hampshire," Venturi says.
That such notions have been greeted with skepticism
is thoroughly understandable. The notion of the library as campus
icon, and something much more than an information warehouse or elaborately
constructed pathway, is an architectural tradition that is by no
means extinguished. Think of Widener Library at Harvard or Butler
Library at Columbia - great neo-classical structures of the early
20th Century that are campus icons from the outside with monumental
spaces on the inside. Recent library designs have not deviated from
this paradigm. The Phoenix Central Library, designed by Will Bruder,
is a great abstract copper mesa with a vast main reading room on
the top floor calculated to add some thrill to the prosaic pleasures
of the books on the shelves. In Vancouver, Moshe Safdie designed
a library that joyfully imitates the ruins of the Coliseum in Rome.
Both libraries are designed with sufficient flexibility to accommodate
future changes in technology or uses.
Much closer to the Dartmouth Green is another great
modern library, one that may haunt Venturi. The Library at Phillips
Exeter Academy is everything Berry is not: a dramatic interior,
featuring a famous square atrium from which one sees views of the
library's stacks behind majestic, 3-story concrete circles.
It is beautiful, graceful, inspiring and in no sense
anything like something originally designed as a sweatshop along
the Amoskeag River. Its architect, Louis Kahn, is not only acknowledged
as among the greatest American architects of the 20th Century, but
was also one of Venturi's most revered mentors.
"We love the idea of layering in architecture,"
says Venturi. Kahn boldly layered circles upon squares at Phillips
Exeter. At Berry, according to Venturi, the architectural excitement
arising out of layering has been moved outside, where he hopes library
patrons will savor the experience of walking along the front of
the building, behind the detached colonnade, in front of the glass-enclosed
ground floor and beneath the rest of the building, cantilevered
over the walkway but not quite touching the arcade itself. He also
hopes that visitors will notice, or at least resonate subliminally,
with the different patterns created by varying the size of windows,
juxtaposed with the patterns created by the brickwork on the facade
and the detached columns. It is a kind of architectural music, and,
while the full experience of the arcade must await additional construction,
Venturi correctly identifies this space as the building's most visually
pleasing.
The question is whether that experience, intriguing
though it may be, will be enough to achieve greatness for what should
be a signature building for Dartmouth College. Rem Koolhaas, the
Dutch architect who won this year's Pritzker, recently designed
a whole campus center for the Illinois Institute of Chicago essentially
by observing and copying the paths students cut in the snow through
the building's site. But for Koolhaas, the pathways were just the
beginning; he has not renounced principles like drama or beauty
in favor of generic lofts that funnel users along the appropriate
campus footpath while being amenable to reconfiguration as technology
and space needs evolve.
Nor does anyone earn Pritzkers by consigning whole
legions of employees - in this instance, a dark basement full of
computer center workers, plus back room after back room of library
support personnel - to windowless spaces that are devoid of character
or any suggestion that those who devote their life to the College
deserve to be inspired or stimulated by their built environment.
It should be noted here that the less theoretical and more practical
aspects of the design - the aspects that transform Venturi's forms
into a working library - were contributed by Shepley Bulfinch Richardson
and Abbott, the Boston architectural firm that also designed the
Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.
Praising one of Venturi's volumes in 1997, the New
York Review of Books noted that Venturi and Scott Brown, though
often "startlingly original," will "often recycle
a basic pattern from one similar project to the next." Berry
is recycled in precisely this sense. The building-as-festive-pedestrian-route
is a concept the firm worked out at its student center for the University
of Delaware, completed in 1996. The firm's recently completed campus
center at Princeton sports an "apparent entrance arcade"
that resembles Berry's detached colonnade. Berry's facade and fenestration
will look familiar to those who have seen the regional government
building that Venturi and Scott Brown recently designed in Toulouse,
France. Asked about the latter resemblance, Scott Brown is quick
to point out that it was the streetscape in the provincial capital
that actually inspired the entrance plan for Berry. "What you've
got there is an arcade from Toulouse," she contends.
It is too soon to ask whether the still-emerging Berry
Library captures the pleasures of the sidewalk in an old European
city, combined with the more artificial graphic stimulation of a
Vegas casino, assembled within the dignified context of 19th Century
New England mill buildings - and whether such a collage yields a
building for the ages. But it is not too soon compare what we already
see of Berry to the nearby Rauner Special Collections library, another
recent Venturi and Scott Brown production. At Rauner, Dartmouth's
rare book collection is contained within a four-story glass display
case that reads as a kind of glorious monument to the printed word,
housed in a renovated neoclassical temple that used to be Webster
Hall. Berry, in contrast, shouts that temples and monuments are
irrelevant, that books and their traditional vainglorious adjuncts
are dinosaurs - that in the digital epoch the library is indistinguishable
from the casino or the shopping mall.
Considered in that light, the duality of Rauner and
Berry could be deemed a fine legacy - a permanent monument to complexity
and contradiction in architecture, as well as to the cultural forces
confronting an Ivy League campus in the 21st Century. "Main
Street," Venturi once famously opined, is "almost all
right." But a college library with a main street? That, too,
is almost all right,.for an era in which beauty and truth seem to
have been co-opted by the computer screen.
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