The main building of the New York Public Library is one of the city’s gems of Beaux Arts architecture. There’s a good argument to be made that it’s the best we’ve ever had, surpassing Penn Station, Grand Central, and the Metropolitan Museum. But is was also built using, in part, some fairly advanced structural techniques: while it does not have a skeleton frame, it does have long-span steel structure. There’s one room where the two ideas of revivalist architecture and modern construction visibly collide. It’s an open hall off of the 42nd Street (north) facade, used for gatherings, exhibitions, and lectures, and known as room 83, then room 80, and now as the Celeste Bartos Forum.
The picture above, from mid-way through its construction in 1908, gives. a sense of the space. A high domed ceiling in the center, supported on four large arches parallel to the sides of the room, and then a lower perimeter of the room. (Because the building’s interiors were still not built out in 1908, you can see a long way through the arched doorway in the center.) The structure of the dome and arches is obviously steel, and therefore they’re not really a “dome” and “arches”: the steel is not only capable of developing tension and bending forces, it’s pretty clearly designed that way. You don’t end up with a Pratt truss by accident. The architectural description is a dome supported on four arches; the structural description is a set of trusses running from a central compression ring to four arched trusses, with four columns supporting the intersection of each pair of trusses at the corners. Here’s another view from about the same time, that gives a good sense of the density of the steel. I’m going to guess that there was more shoring used to erect the dome trusses than just those two huge timbers.
In case it’s not clear, the room is at the base of a light well that allows for windows in the interior of the building, with the dome sticking up a bit into the well. Here’s a view from above:
The big arched windows on the top left are the main reading room, and the vertical strip windows below are the stacks. One of the places that the building’s architecture deviates from its classical inspiration is that the stack windows – in the two light courts facing the east side of the stacks and at the west facade facing Bryant Park – are unornamented vertical strips. These are very modern windows, one might even say with a form that’s following their function. In any case, the way that the dome sticks up allows for clerestory windows on its sides. Here’s the room after the finishes were put in place at the dome and plasterwork was in progress at the walls:
All that steel in the arches and dome is hidden – pretty cleverly – to create a specific architectural image. But the four steel columns at the corners are not only exposed, they’ve been decorated. It’s hard to see in this picture, but each column is a built-up square, with plaster at the corners[efn_note]The columns are “Gray columns” consisting of four pairs of angles riveted and strapped together.[/efn_note] and vestigial corinthian capitals peeking out at the spring points of the arches. If you go to the NYPL site (the sixth photo in this series) you can see the little pieces of capital.
I would not have been surprised had the original design hidden all of the steel columns behind plaster to fake masonry piers, and I would have been only mildly surprised if the steel had been left exposed. But hiding the roof steel and treating the columns as architectural elements to incorporate the corinthian order was an interesting design choice. I wonder if it’s the result of the designers being torn between those two ideas.
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