Sterling Memorial Library (SML) is the main library building of the Yale University Library system in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Opened in 1931, the library was designed by James Gamble Rogers as the centerpiece of Yale's Gothic Revival campus. The library's tower has sixteen levels of bookstacks containing over 4 million volumes. Several special collections—including the university's Manuscripts & Archives—are also housed in the building. It connects via tunnel to the underground Bass Library, which holds an additional 150,000 volumes.
The library is named for John W. Sterling, a lawyer representing Standard Oil, whose huge bequest to Yale required that an "enduring, useful and architecturally beautiful edifice" be built. Sterling Library is elaborately ornamented, featuring extensive sculpture and painting as well as hundreds of panes of stained glass created by G. Owen Bonawit. In addition to the book tower, Rogers' design featured five large reading rooms and two courtyards, one of which is now a music library.
While the library's nave and main reading rooms can be visited on guided tours, its collections are restricted to cardholders.
History
For the ninety years prior to the construction of Sterling Memorial Library, Yale's library collections had been held in the College Library, a chapel-like Gothic Revival building on Yale's Old Campus now known as Dwight Hall. Built to house a collection of 40,000 books in the 1840s, and later expanded to Linsly Hall and Chittenden Hall, the old library could not hold Yale's swelling book collection, which had grown to over one million volumes.
In 1918, Yale received a $17-million bequest from John W. Sterling, founder of the New York law firm Shearman & Sterling, providing that Yale construct "at least one enduring, useful and architecturally beautiful edifice." The largest bequest in the history of any American university, it initiated a major period of construction on Yale's campus. Because of the library collection's growth, the university decided to make the centerpiece of Sterling's gift a new library with a capacity for 3.5 million volumes.
The building's original architect, Bertram Goodhue, intended the library to resemble his State Capitol Building in Lincoln, Nebraska, with the library's books in a prominent tower. When Goodhue died in 1924, the project passed to James Gamble Rogers, the university's consulting architect. Rogers' work on a "General Plan" for the Yale campus allowed him to incorporate the main library project into his neo-Gothic scheme for Yale's expansion.
Roger's campus plan called for the library to sit on a new main courtyard, now called Cross Campus. Originally, he planned to balance the courtyard with a 5,000-seat chapel facing opposite the library. With the end of compulsory undergraduate chapel services in 1926 and the lack of a financier, the chapel was never built. Expanding on Goodhue's tower concept, Rogers proposed the library take the form of a cathedral, which, in his own words, would be "as near to modern Gothic as we dared to make it." He modeled the library's entrance hall to resemble a vaulted nave and commissioned extensive stained glass and stone ornament to decorate the building's exterior and interior.
The library's footprint would take up more than half a city block. Twenty buildings were cleared for its construction, many of them private homes. Although excavation began in the fall of 1927, the construction site was not fully secured until July 1928, when the final holdout homeowner agreed to sell.
While the new library was planned and constructed, Yale began soliciting gifts from its alumni for the new library. By 1931, the collection had grown to nearly 2 million volumes, many of them rare books and manuscripts. Among the most important of these acquisitions was a Gutenberg Bible donated by Anna Harkness. The bible became the centerpiece of the new library's Rare Book Room, which allowed students and researchers to browse the most valuable books in the university's collection for the first time. These collections would later become the adjoining Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Critical reception Like much of Yale's Gothic revival construction of the same era, the new library was criticized as expensive and retrograde. William Harlan Hale, writing in The Nation, scorned it as a "cathedral orgy," criticized the library's bastardized cathedral aesthetics and the university's timid anti-modernism. Many students of architecture leveled similar criticisms. Others asserted that the project was either sanctimonious or sacrilegious for merging academic purpose and religious architecture.
Later critics have praised the building's ambition, beauty, and pragmatism.
Building The library is situated on Yale's Cross Campus, the central quadrangle of the university. Surrounding buildings, including Berkeley College, Trumbull College, and Sterling Law Building were designed by Rogers and built in the same period and Gothic Revival style as the library.
Nave
The entrance hall of the library is known as the "nave" because it imitates the main approach of a cathedral. At its western terminus is a chancel containing an ornate circulation desk and altarpiece mural painted by Eugene Savage. Constructed of Indiana limestone and Ohio sandstone blocks, the nave is a self-supporting stone structure with none of the steel reinforcement used elsewhere in the library. It is elaborately decorated with stone and wood carving, ironwork, stained glass windows, and ceiling bosses. The main hall is flanked by two aisles, which originally held card catalogs for the library bookstacks. Though the original catalog drawers remain in the aisles, the cards have been removed and the aisles converted to seating areas and a computer lab. At its western end it is intersected by a transept, which leads to the library's main reading room on one end and its wing on the other. For many years, smoking was allowed in the nave, which left a layer of soot on its upper levels. Beginning in 2013, the nave underwent a $20-million, yearlong renovation to clean its surfaces, restore its architectural details, overhaul building systems, and reconfigure visitor circulation and services.
Tower Fifteen levels of library materials, primarily books, are housed in the building's tower, commonly referred to as the "Stacks". Originally intended to house 3.5 million volumes, it is a seven-story structure, with eight mezzanine levels interleaved between the main stories. Although encased in a Gothic exterior, the tower's structural system is a welded steel frame, which permits a vertical rise that traditional Gothic techniques would not. The crenelated roof of the tower is elaborately decorated, complete with a castle-like housing for air handling equipment.
The tower's shelves are estimated to stretch , contained within of aisles. In addition to the library collections, the tower houses reading rooms, study carrels, library offices, and special collections, including the Babylonian Collection. Access to the Stacks is restricted to affiliates of the university and library patrons.
Reading rooms
Four reading rooms sit near the nave on the first floor of the library:
Starr Reading Room, the main reading room of the library, is at the south end of the library, next to Trumbull College. It is a reference room designed in the style of a monastic refectory. Under a barrel-vaulted ceiling, the room is lined with traceried windows and oak bookshelves decorated with a botanical frieze. A 1998 restoration was funded by The Starr Foundation. The Periodical Reading Room, lined with oak shelves like those of the main reading room, is reached through from a vestibule on the north side of the nave. The room can hold 1,800 periodicals and features windows decorated with signs of the zodiac to symbolize periodicity. Linonia and Brothers Reading Room, a Tudor-style browsing room at the building's northeast corner. It is named for Yale's two 18th-century literary societies, Linonia and Brothers in Unity, and holds about 20,000 books. Intended to be a "gentlemen's club" for leisure reading, it was not opened to women until the 1960s. Franke Family Reading Room, a periodical browsing room, is in the library's southeast corner. Originally a room for frequently-used materials known as the Reserve Book Room, its collections were moved to Cross Campus Library in 1971.
The tower holds smaller reading rooms for the library's area studies holdings, including African, East Asian, Latin American, Near East, Slavic and East European, Southeast Asian, and Judaica collections. There are also dedicated reading rooms for several fields of study, including American Studies, History, and Philosophy.
Wing
Sterling's northern wing, accessed from the nave via a cloister hallway, contains the library's offices as well as three major rooms: a lecture hall, the Memorabilia Room, and the Rare Book Room. The Memorabilia Room hosts temporary exhibitions of Yale's archival collections and university history, and serves as an antechamber to the 120-seat lecture hall.
The Rare Book Room, designed after English Jacobean architecture, was built to allow library patrons to browse Yale's collection of rare books and manuscripts. A vaulted, octagonal chapel behind the room was specially constructed to house a copy of the Gutenberg Bible. The completion of the Beinecke Library in 1963 provided a more secure, climate-controlled repository for rare books, and the room and chapel now serve as a browsing room for the library's Manuscripts & Archives department.
Courtyard
The library originally had two courtyards designed and landscaped by Beatrix Farrand. In 1997, the western courtyard was enclosed and renovated to become the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. Sterling's remaining courtyard, named the Selin Courtyard, features motifs from the history of printing.
Decoration The library is one of the most elaborate buildings on the Yale campus. Rogers commissioned artisans, including stained glass artist G. Owen Bonawit and blacksmith Samuel Yellin, who worked with Rogers on many of his buildings, sculptor Rene Paul Chambellan, and painter Eugene Savage. The building's exterior is decorated with stone gargoyles, reliefs, and inscriptions. The nave is the most ornately decorated library interior, although ornamental features, particularly stained-glass windows, can be found in nearly every room in the building.
Entrance relief
A limestone low relief above the library's main entrance symbolizes the scholarly achievements of ancient civilizations. It is the work of architectural sculptor Rene Paul Chambellan, who executed a design produced by Lee Lawrie. The scene depicts Cro-Magnon, Egyptian, Assyrian, Hebrew, Arab, Greek, Mayan, and Chinese scholars, with inscriptions from major works in each writing system. At center is a medieval scholar, and directly above the doors are symbolic representations of major civilizations, which include a Phoenician ship, a Babylonian lamassu and the Capitoline wolf of Rome.
Alma Mater mural
At the western end of the nave is a fresco painted by Eugene Savage, a professor in the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Savage titled it "The Imagination that Directs the University's Spiritual and Intellectual Efforts," but it is commonly known as the Alma Mater mural for its depiction of a personified "University." Savage, an expert in Early Renaissance techniques, painted the mural in his characteristic style, an Art Deco interpretation of traditional Renaissance composition. Surrounding "Alma Mater" are personifications of academic disciplines.
Stained glass