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* The Wall Street Journal

* MASTERPIECE
* NOVEMBER 14, 2009

This Library Speaks Volumes
Frank Furness treated reading as an active enterprise
By MICHAEL J. LEWIS

The cornerstones of two great American libraries were laid just a month apart in the fall of 1888, one in Philadelphia and one in Boston. The buildings could not be more dissimilar. The Boston Public Library was the first of its kind, a decorous marble palazzo of the highest quality, and its classical-revival descendants can be found in most large American cities. The library of the University of Pennsylvania, however, would be the last of its kind, a Victorian leviathan of red brick and riveted iron beams, looking from one end like a French cathedral and from the other like an elaborate greenhouse. If the Boston library was a lesson in good manners, the Philadelphia structure seemed a cheeky act of architectural impertinence.

Today the University of Pennsylvania building, now known as the Fisher Fine Arts Library, is widely acknowledged as one of the great creations of 19th-century American culture, and the principal work of its architect, Frank Furness (1839-1912). And at a moment when both the practice and technology of reading are radically changing, its lessons seem more urgent than ever.

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It is hard to imagine an architect of libraries (of which he designed half a dozen) less bookish than Furness. His entire life seems a sustained effort to evade books altogether, no easy feat in his extraordinarily literary family. His father was the Rev. William Henry Furness, Philadelphia's celebrated Unitarian minister, who wrote a score of books and seemed unable to go from breakfast to dinner without writing at least a small pamphlet. Frank's brother Horace Howard Furness spent his life producing the mighty Shakespeare Variorum, a guide to every variant edition of Shakespeare's plays. Even his sister Annis translated German poetry into English, evidently for relaxation.

But young Frank shunned reading for more physical pursuits, earning the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Civil War for his battlefield exploits. When he began to practice architecture after the war, he had no patience for designers who took their inspiration from books. An awestruck Louis Sullivan, who began his own career as a draftsman for Furness, noted how he made his buildings "out of his head." Another draftsman observed that the only book Furness ever praised was Viollet-le-Duc's richly illustrated Dictionnaire Raisonné de l'Architecture. (With characteristic perversity, Furness—who had no French—cited the one book he was unable to read.)

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Because books were such a familiar and natural component of Furness's upbringing, he did not sentimentalize them. When his contemporaries set about designing libraries, they tended to treat them reverently, as if they were a shrine for sacred objects. But Furness knew that books were active, useful, even incendiary things—the antebellum abolitionist tracts that his father wrote had brought repeated death threats.

Frank Furness's building, then, was perhaps the only library to treat the act of reading as an active and dynamic enterprise. The building is an engine of active thought, divided into four separate volumes, each serving a different function and assuming a different shape. Most dominant is the stairhall, rising to 95 feet and isolated from the library proper so that the sound of footsteps would not penetrate the main reading room (a problem that classical libraries, with their central stair, never quite resolve).

Behind the stair tower Furness placed the main reading room with its circulation desk. Instead of creating a serene repose similar to that of the Boston library, he surrounded the room with low-slung arches that look as if they might have been filched from a Roman aqueduct, carrying walls of vivid red brick and yellow terra cotta. These rise four stories to a massive skylighted roof, and one sits beneath it to read as if at the bottom of a vast and brilliantly lighted well.

Beyond beckons the second reading room, which terminates in a sweeping semicircle given over to a series of private study rooms, the library counterpart to the radiating corona of chapels in a French Gothic cathedral. But while a cathedral is oriented to the east and the rising sun, Furness turned his reading room north to ensure steady, even light. Lest the space seem too sacral, he capped it with a mighty array of iron beams, each of which comes to rest on a delicate terra cotta leaf, a kind of whimsical architectural fig leaf to cover the groin where metal limb meets masonry body.

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Weirdest of all were the stacks, placed to the south at the opposite end of the building. Designed in consultation with Melvil Dewey (the library was one of the first to use the Dewey decimal system), these were of translucent glass and iron, three stories in height, so that sunlight would filter through them. Not only did they have the character of an industrial plant, but they could be extended as a piece of machinery: Furness mounted the rear wall on jackscrews so that, as he told his clients, "the book stack admits of infinite extension." Here was perhaps the only library in the world that solved the problem of new acquisitions—and which treated the book as a component in an industrial process, rather than a ornament to be encased in a jewel box.

The stacks, alas, were replaced with concrete floors for reasons of fire safety during the 1980s, in the course of a superlative restoration by Robert Venturi. Oddly enough, Venturi first met his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown nearly 50 years ago—at a meeting of professors to protest the planned demolition of the library.

Except for our dwellings, there are few buildings we come to know intimately. A college library is one exception, a building we tend to inhabit fully, day and night. And even if critics did not respect Furness's brooding building, its users have always loved it, as much for its tactile richness as for its generous light and space.

Furness was born 170 years ago this week, on Nov. 12, 1839. He lived to see many of his finest works demolished or mutilated, and even his library at Penn became cluttered with extensions. Yet it remains unbowed, still greeting one from afar with the upraised head of the stair tower, capped with a colossal arch whose components are so deeply scored that it suggests a mighty brow furrowed in concentration. In a country whose libraries have been temples, palaces or warehouses, here is one dedicated to the mystery of active thought.

—Mr. Lewis is Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor at Williams College. His books include "Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind" (W. W. Norton).