The Suzzallo Library, named after Henry Suzzallo, the fifteenth president of the university, opened in 1926. The architects of Suzzallo Library, Charles H. Bebb and Carl F. Gould Sr., had a vision of a campus united by design and reflecting the age-old traditions of the academy as personified by Oxford and Cambridge. Suzzallo Library was to be their centerpiece. The library embodies collegiate gothic with its soaring west facade and row of eleven 35 foot high stained glass windows and terra-cotta and cast-stone figures. When planning began in 1922, Henry Suzzallo envisioned a library that was "the soul of the university."
A highlight of Suzzallo Library is the Reading Room, taking up the entire west facade on the third floor. The room is 241 feet long and 65 feet high. Carved oak friezes depict northwest flora, windows are decorated by watermarks and two spectacular light fixtures in the form of globes hang at each end of the room. On sunny days, light flows through the windows and students can be found studying and slumbering in what is undoubtedly the most beautiful room on campus.
Bebb and Gould's original design for Suzzallo Library form a triangle with three wings and a 300 foot high carillon book tower in the center. The west wing opened in 1926 and the south wing in 1935. The north wing was finally completed in 1963 (designed by Bindon and Wright) though in a jarring concrete and glass sixties mode rather than the traditional collegiate gothic. The book tower was never built.
In the late 1980s, the libraries, again pressed for space, planned a new addition. In 1990, the Kenneth S. Allen Library opened. Allen was an associate director of the UW Libraries from 1960 until 1982 and his son, Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, helped finance this new building.
Allen Library, designed by Edward Larabee Barnes/John M.Y. Lee & Partners, returned to a modified collegiate gothic style with an imaginative use of brickwork and green tinted glass which echo the older buildings on campus. A unique feature of the building is an arcade between the north and south wings which acts as a major cross-campus pathway.
The Suzzallo and Allen Libraries remain the prominent symbol of learning on campus, a building that is indeed a "cathedral of books" housing more than sixty miles of shelving for collections and offices for staff with expertise in the social sciences, natural sciences and humanities.
Credits: Photographs courtesy of University Photography and Special Collections and Preservation Division, University Libraries.
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Friday October 20, 2006
