The Library Resting on Steel

The great reading room of the New York Public Library, opened in 1911, rests on a hidden feat: floors of steel stacks that carry the building and store millions of books.

Designed by Carrère & Hastings in the Beaux-Arts style, the library rises on the site of the former Croton Reservoir in the heart of Manhattan. Beneath the immense reading room, a metal structure of shelving supports both the collections and the readers' floor—a hidden feat that allows millions of volumes to be stored without sacrificing the majesty of the public hall.

The system is designed for speed. The reader submits a request; pneumatic tubes dispatch it into the stacks, and books ascend by book lifts in a few minutes. The library functions like a machine for delivering knowledge, calibrated to the industrial scale of the city.

The room itself, nearly eighty meters long under a painted ceiling, is calibrated for light and quiet. It embodies the ambition of the industrial age: to offer the public nearly instant access to a gigantic written memory—and to make reading both a civic spectacle and private research.