architect: Wolfgang Tschapeller

location: Ithaca, New York

year: 2017

Ho Fine Arts Library
College of Architecture, Art, and Planning
Cornell University

“The design for the Ho Fine Arts Library is an immediate and quite physical invitation to discover an extraordinary collection, which appears as one big volume, visible in its entirety upon entering. Winding staircases are the keys to enter this volume of knowledge, browse, read, and wonder.” Wolfgang Tschapeller (M.Arch. ’87), architect

Cornell University is creating a new home for one of the nation’s most distinguished fine arts libraries. The library will serve as a luminescent welcome sign to all those arriving to the campus from the north or leaving the campus from the south.
Architect and AAP alumnus Wolfgang Tschapeller (M.Arch. '87) was chosen in 2013 as the designer for the FAL. The architectural goal is a 21st-century interpretation of the grand reading rooms associated with great research collections. The library will be a space where people intermingle with books, but are also surrounded by digital resources and opportunities for collaborative study.
The fine arts collection at Cornell ranks among the best circulating collection of its kind. The collection serves all visual and design disciplines at Cornell University, from the history of art to classics to landscape architecture,  to archeology, planning, museum studies, to fiber science to the fine arts. By investing in books—not instead of digital resources but in addition to—Cornell is staking out increasingly rare territory in defense of the physical artifact as a durable and irreplaceable academic and creative resource in the visual arts.

Over the decades, it has expanded and deepened. It is the most heavily used special collection at Cornell, valued across the university and well beyond as a teaching and research resource of rare quality. The renovated library is expected to open for fall semester 2017.
The envelope of Rand Hall requires extensive rehabilitation radically adapting the building to a new program. The architectural goal is to respect the past while projecting boldly into the future in order to stage a temporal dialogue. The new roof super-structure is a direct consequence of the section, in which four levels of narrow book stacks are arranged vertically to provide floor space for collective reading, study, and public computing. The vertical stacks rise up beyond the original roofline, requiring a new building terminus. The lantern provides the volume needed to house the uppermost level of books and day lighting for the double-height interior space of the library.