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Rhode Island » Providence » College Hill and East Side » Brown Center Campus and North » John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Humanities Library

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Humanities Library

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1962–1964, Warner, Burns, Toan and Lund. 10 Prospect St.
  • (Photograph by Patricia Lynette Searl)
  • (Photograph by Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0)

By the time of the seven-story Rockefeller Library (in campus lingo, “The Rock”), with three floors sunk into the slope of College Hill and four out of it, stacks were placed on warehouse floors for flexibility, which is denied by the metal and glass structure built into the Hay Library. The thin formality of the Rock's symmetry, with an approach on broad stairs to the equivalent of a classical stylobate, all treated as “floating slabs” in a manner which Ludwig Mies van der Rohe developed, proclaims it as typical of the 1960s revival of traditional neoclassical monumentality. There is here the same compromise between modernism and neoclassicism which also appears in Philip Johnson's List Art Building ( PR85) across the street.

Writing Credits

Author: 
William H. Jordy et al.
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Data

What's Nearby

Albert and Vera List Art Building, Brown University
Brown University Center Campus
John Hay Library
Eliza Ward–Marsden J. Perry House
Providence Athenaeum

Citation

William H. Jordy et al., "John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Humanities Library", [Providence, Rhode Island], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/RI-01-PR115.3.

Print Source

Buildings of Rhode Island, William H. Jordy, with Ronald J. Onorato and William McKenzie Woodward. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 103-103.

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