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Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library

Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library
Courtesy of NYPL, photo by John Bartelstone

Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library

SNFL is a new-generation library for all New Yorkers, with special facilities for young users, adult learning, and business. It offers the perfect contemporary complement to NYPL’s world-famous Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (SASB), located across Fifth Avenue from SNFL. SASB opened in 1911, designed by architects Carrère & Hastings in a glorious Beaux-Art style, and receives over 1.7 million visits a year as the mothership of NYPL’s reference collections.

New features at SNFL reflect this harmony between the buildings: long tables that recall the impressive scale of those in SASB’s Rose Main Reading Room, ceiling artwork in the Long Room that echoes the neo-classical paintings set in SASB’s ceilings, and the use of classic materials including natural stone, terrazzo, and oak.

SNFL has an annual circulation of two million items, and this sheer volume generates challenges in access, organization, and storage. The design solution offers more space, more books, more seats, and lower shelves. The heart of the library is the Long Room, a new space that truly brings the idea of a library into the old structure, which was originally designed as a department store. This dramatic linear atrium separates three floors of flexible, daylit reading areas on one side and five levels of book stacks on the other, a creative and efficient solution to balancing the need for a browsable collection and the desire for more public reading room space. 

Above the Long Room, the fifth and sixth floors host the Business Center and the Pasculano Learning Center facilities. SNFL now delivers to the Midtown cityscape a sensational new public roof attraction and a striking sculptural addition. Elevators and stairs continue to the seventh floor, which is built at the original building’s roof level. This new floor has pitched wood slat ceilings and contains a flexible 268-occupant conference and event center.

An L-shaped roof terrace runs above the 40th Street and Fifth Avenue facades and includes a roof garden and an adjacent indoor café. It is Manhattan’s only free, publicly-accessible roof terrace and offers staggering Midtown views, including across Fifth Avenue to the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building and surrounding skyscrapers.

Above the seventh floor, a dramatic new roof slopes up to cover mechanical equipment, reaching 56m (184 feet) above street level. Its angled pitches, and a patinated copper-colored aluminum surface, are inspired by Manhattan’s Beaux Art copper-clad mansard roofs, two 1904 examples of which are visible from the terrace. As a new native New Yorker, the form also nods to the tapering spires of New York’s art deco skyscrapers and faceted facades of its newer towers.

Reimagining the New York Public Library's Midtown Campus

Reimagining the New York Public Library's Midtown Campus
Courtesy of NYPL, photo by John Bartelstone

This largest public-private rehabilitation in NYPL's history creates a lending library that serves as both a model and catalyst for a rejuvenated library system. The transformed library, occupying a 1914 building originally designed for the Arnold Constable department store, adds 35 percent more public space and hundreds more seats. The renovation adds a floor to the roof, housing new programs and event space, as well as a wraparound public terrace. The circulating collection, with more than 1.7 million visits a year, is housed in "The Long Room," offering five floors of browsable book stacks, and two floors of meeting and consultation rooms. A dedicated business library and an adult learning center each occupy a full floor. A floor is also dedicated to a children's library and a separate library for teens. More than 11,000 SF of multipurpose space is used for classes, events, one-on-one consultations, seminars, and a host of other programs, maximizing availability and diversity of public offerings. BBB is working in collaboration with Mecanoo on the Midtown Campus Renovation, which includes renovation of the historic and iconic Stephen A. Schwarzman Building across Fifth Avenue.

Brand description

Beyer Blinder Belle was founded in 1968, in the wake of the urban renewal movement in the United States, when the social fabric of cities, communities, and buildings was compromised by the prevailing attitudes about planning and architecture. We pioneered and defined a different approach to the design of the built environment that focused on architecture empowering people — their interaction with each other on streets and in neighborhoods, their pleasure in moving through the city, and their connections to the surrounding physical fabric.

This mission has guided us for more than five decades and has shaped a broad and award-winning practice — now 170 professionals in New York City, Washington, DC and Boston engaged in architecture, planning, and interiors. A persistent exploration of historic, cultural and civic meaning guides our work, while our design is contemporary and reflects the materials and technology of today.

Planning, restoration and the design of new buildings are the fundamental underpinnings of our practice. Many of our projects involve the stewardship of historic buildings in sensitive urban sites — the work for which we have become best recognized. Our deep sense of identity and evolving perspectives on design have guided our practice in new construction as well as master planning and urban design. With our clients and friends, we continue the dialogue.

Our areas of specialization include:

Civic

Commercial

Cultural

Education

Historic Preservation

Interiors

Planning & Urban Design

Residential

Products applied in Commercial , Educational , Landscape , +2
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