ABSTRACT
Reflecting upon his design for the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University 25 years after its completion, Gordon Bunshaft said, “I think it is one of the half-dozen best buildings I’ve ever done in my life. It’s the only building I’ve been involved in that has an emotional impact.”1 This singling-out of the Beinecke Library is remarkable in several aspects. First, Bunshaft had a long career as a designer at one of the twentieth century’s most prolific architecture firms—Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). As a partner at SOM’s New York City office, Bunshaft was responsible for designing many of the institutional and corporate buildings that came to define an important segment of postwar modernism in America.2 Among his influential works were Lever House (1952), Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company (1954), Pepsi-Cola Headquarters (1960), Chase Manhattan Bank (1961) in New York City, and the Hirshhorn Museum (1974) in Washington, DC.3 The Beinecke Library, at 8,200 square meters (88,000 square feet) in area, is a relatively small project located outside of New York City, where many of Bunshaft’s larger, well-known projects were built. While much of his work was engaged primarily with the dual aesthetic obsessions of midcentury modernism—pure, simple form and transparency—the Beinecke Library embraces only the former while renouncing the latter to focus instead on the experiential qualities of translucency, the intangible source of the “emotional impact” that, for Bunshaft, characterized the Beinecke Library.4
