The Beaux Arts architecture of the New York Public Library’s main building sends a strong message about decorum—boisterous tourists adopt hushed tones, and even journalists who normally wear jeans to press conferences wear suits and ties when summoned to the Carerre and Hastings masterpiece. But it is precisely because of the 1911 building’s association with refinement and scholarly research that a plan to insert a 100,000-square-foot circulating library into its guts has been called sacrilegious.
So it’s surprising that the library has released renderings of the new circulating branch, by Foster + Partners, that seem likely to exacerbate the criticism. Norman Foster has created spectacular spaces within neoclassical buildings—the Great Court of the British Museum and the Reichstag dome in Berlin come to mind. But the library renderings show bland spaces cantilevered over an atrium that could be in a mall or even on a cruise ship. The new rooms couldn’t be as handsomely detailed as those by Carerre and Hastings, of course, but the project demands something more than generic, blandly commercial architecture. Worse, the renderers at dbox chose to populate the new rooms with 20-somethings bearing MacBooks (rather than real books), suggesting precisely the kind of populism that has defenders of the building up in arms. The library is in the midst of a hard-fought public relations campaign, and the new renderings don’t help its case.
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