The Architecture of St. Paul's School
and the Design of Ohrstrom Library
by Robert Stern
Stern's "Secret History of Ohrstrom Library" and Conclusion
With this survey of St. Paul's architectural history and the brief account of the Ohrstrom Library's "local" history behind us, I would like to take a few more minutes of your time and suggest to you another history for the new library building, a kind of secret history, if you will, because every building has such a history as well as the more conventional revealed history of its commission, construction, and context. An architect who comes to a site and only makes a new building based just on what the client needs, or what the new building must cost, or even what the natural and man-made context of the new building is, is not doing his job to the fullest. An architect must bring to the site other things: his or her own talents, to be sure, but also images and ideas that come out of his training, his experience. and his commitment to architecture as an ongoing language of expression.
So, I'd like to share with you a few details of the secret history of Ohrstrom Library. Secrets that are not such secrets anymore, because when Ted Pillsbury presented the library to a great meeting of the school that convened in New York's Pierre Hotel about two years ago, he immediately "blew my cover," by revealing a principal source of my inspiration. Upon reviewing the drawings for the building, Ted immediately saw in them my reverence for the small libraries that the architect H.H. Richardson built around Boston in the late 1870s and early 1880s, in particular the Crane Library in Quincy, Massachusetts, which was extremely influential in our thinking.[77] The example of Richardson takes on a particular importance, because Richardson probably influenced Vaughan in his proposed design for the school's library as well. Richardson pioneered the modern conception of the village or small-town library. More than a book repository, he saw it as a community center, and developed a plan that included important public gathering spaces separated from the book room to create privacy for each and a synergy between the two.
In the Crane Library, Richardson adopts the traditional plan of a church. A transept-like hallway rushes across the building at its narrow part, separating the choir-like reading room from the nave-like bookroom, where book-lined, double-height alcoves are arranged chapel-like along the edges. From the reader's point of view, Richardson's plan is a marvel, but from the librarian's point of view, it has always been a nightmare because one cannot easily rearrange or expand the collection. So what we have done--listening very carefully to Rosemarie Cassels Brown, the school's librarian, and Rodney Armstrong, the school's library consultant--is to transform the Richardsonian prototype by putting the book stacks in the center and creating glassed-in, double-height alcoves along the edge where they could be flooded with light, where readers could enjoy views of both chapels and the school's grounds. We've put an uncomplicated arrangement of continuous bookstacks on the inside protected from harmful light and, on the outside, put readers in lounge chairs, at carrels, or at tables where seminars or group study can take place, or where one can just simply spread out. To put it bluntly, we've turned Richardson inside out, while maintaining his essential arrangement by keeping the big rooms--the reading rooms, the gathering rooms, the living rooms for the school--to the northwest facing the Lower School pond, and separating the two elements with a third, a dramatic transept in the form of a hall containing the catalogues and circulation desk and the principal staircase.
You can also see, if you visit Crane Library or any other of Richardson's public buildings, the palette of materials that were his signature, the reds and tawny browns of the Longmeadow stone that he preferred above all others, and the bold handling of that stone so as to yield a real presence, a materiality. The Crane Library is one of Richardson's most accomplished compositions, a simple mass that has as its principal focus a slender, post-like turret just to one side of a boldly scaled, cavernous yet welcoming door. I hope we've turned Richardson's approach--from his massing to his sense of materials, his love of polychromy, and his reverence for the reader brought in close contact with the book--to good effect in our design.
There exists another "secret" source in our thinking about Ohrstrom Library, perhaps one more surprising, in that its context is not only urban but also not local or regional: the second phase of the complex that Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed for the School of Art in Glasgow, Scotland.[78] For the school's new wing, which contains the library, Mackintosh achieved an important synthesis between traditional form and modern abstraction, reinterpreting the massing of the Scottish keep, with sheer stone walls, a crenelated skyline, and continuous oriel windows. I hope that some of my sympathies for Mackintosh's approach comes through not only in the tall oriel windows which flood our library with light and allow views all around, but in the abstraction of the details and in the way we have sought to mediate between the small scale of Kittredge, the bigger scale of Nash, and the buttressed chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul. I hope as well, that our juxtaposition of metal against glass, as in Mackintosh's design, conveys a feeling of light, space, and modernity, without compromising the sense of solidity and mass that is a hallmark of traditional building.
If Ohrstrom succeeds, it does so because it transcends the local to address the general. A building must be rooted in its place, but not bogged down by it. Place must nurture but not wholly circumscribe. With this in mind, I viewed the designing of Ohrstrom as the resumption of an interrupted conversation that had begun in the 1850s and achieved heights of eloquence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but had been obscured and confused in the post-war era. I viewed the design of Ohrstrom as an opportunity to reaffirm that a modern building need not, indeed must not, be a repudiation of the past. I went back to the Schoolhouse as the last coherent point of reference. In a word, I tried to pick up where James Gamble Rogers left off. Conversations with many trustees and with the building committee encouraged me in this approach; George Baker was particularly supportive, reinforcing my conviction that very often in architecture one has to look backward to go forward. I hope that as you visit Ohrstrom, and in particular when you tour its interiors, you will be reminded of the Tudorbethan of Vaughan and especially of Rogers. I hope as you look around, the details, which are the words and phrases of architectural language, will seem familiar to you, but that the conversation our design for Ohrstrom makes with the old chapel, with the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul, with the Upper School, and with the Schoolhouse, will not seem repetitious, but rather fresh and lively; that Ohrstrom Library, and particularly its principal reading rooms will be not only places to fulfill a class assignment or pursue a scholarly project, but rooms to gather together in the company of books and the ideas they embody. Programmed as a library, if it succeeds, Ohrstrom must transcend simple utility to become a living room for the school.
I hope that as you walk around Ohrstrom Library and get to use it, to know it, you will not only like the building for itself and for what it offers in the way of services, but also begin to see again with fresh eyes the architecture of St. Paul's School and the values it embodies. When we talk of the architecture of St. Paul's School, it is not just the buildings that we refer to, very fine though many of them are, nor just the traditions they represent, but the urbanism they help create, the community they help structure: I hope Ohrstrom Library locks into that village, adds to that sense of community, which is the essence of the school. I hope as well that Ohrstrom not only functions well, but becomes a further reference point for work by future trustees and architects, building here and elsewhere; not an end point or beginning point--such would be both too naive and too arrogant to claim--but an important place along the route, a significant phrase in the conversation over time that is architecture in general and the architecture of St. Paul's School in particular.
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77 Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1888), 78-81; Henry Russell Hitchcock, The Architecture of H.H. Richardson and his Times (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 210-213; L. Draper Hill, The Crane Library (Quincy, Massachusetts: Trustees of the Thomas Crane Public Library, 1962); Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, H.H. Richardson, Cornplete Architectural Works (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 226-231.
78 Thomas Howarth, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 69-92; Douglas Percy Bliss, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art (Glasgow: Glasgow School of Art, 1961); Jackie Cooper, ed., Charles Rennie Mackintosh: the Complete Buildings and Selected Projects (London: Academy Editions, 1984), 20-29.