Philips Exeter Library

For the Exeter Library, Kahn again used a great central space. In classical and neoclassical buildings, the central space had symbolized a social hierarchy, with certain people of functions occupying the center and others relegated to the  periphery. Modern architecture had rejected this centrality as undemocratic.

Frank Lloyd Wright placed a massive fireplace at the center of his early houses, displacing people from the center to move about it in an architectural version of the Copernican revolution. The European architects, such as Le Corbusier, used a grid made up of columns that made all of the spaces equally important and none central.

But Kahn realized that hierarchy is not necessarily incompatible with democratic ideals. The differences among people implied by previous hierarchies can be internalized into each person. Kahn’s realizations was similar to those of Freud and Jung, who saw the great human dramas, which had previously been acted out by Oedipus, the Hero, or the Mother Goddess, internalized into the individual’s psyche. By reflecting a full range of human complexity, or hierarchy, in his buildings, Kahn restored a richness to architecture that had to a large extent been absent in the modern movement.

In the Exeter Library, Kahn was concerned with how the person and the book come together. He said:

“I see the library as a place where the librarian can lay out the books, open especially to selected pages to seduce the reader. There should be a place with great tables on which the librarian can put the books, and the reader should be able to take the book and go to the light.”

At Exeter, Kahn designed a great central space. Through the roof, through the stacks, and through the great circular shapes cut in the walls, light comes into the space. In this central space, the librarian can display books, and the reader can then carry them to study carrels, or alcoves, along the perimeter of the building.

The carrels are illuminated by great windows starting above the eye level of the reader, and each carrel has a smaller eye-level window with a sliding wooden shutter, which can be closed for privacy and concentration, or opened to permit a view of woodened campus.