The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL) is a new-generation library for all New Yorkers, with special facilities for young users, adult learning, and business. Since 1982, SNFL has been housed in a former department store with a landmark 1914 façade. It offers the perfect contemporary complement to The New York Public Library’s world-famous Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (SASB), located across Fifth Avenue from SNFL. SASB, opened in 1911, was designed by architects Carrère & Hastings in a glorious Beaux-Art style and is the mothership of NYPL’s reference collections.
New features at SNFL reflect this harmony between the buildings: long tables that recall the impressive scale of those in SASB’s Rose Main Reading Room, ceiling artwork in the Long Room that echoes the neo-classical paintings set in SASB’s ceilings, and the use of classic materials including natural stone, terrazzo, and oak.
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, with 1.7 million visits a year, has an annual circulation of two million items, and this sheer volume generates challenges in access, organisation, and storage. The design solution offers more space, more books, more seats, and lower shelves. The heart of the library is the Long Room, a new space that truly brings the idea of a library into the old structure.
This dramatic linear atrium separates three floors of flexible, daylit reading areas on one side and five levels of book stacks on the other, a creative and efficient solution to balancing the need for a browsable collection and the desire for more public reading room space. Above the Long Room, the fourth and fifth floors host the Business Center and the Pasculano Learning Center facilities.
Elevators and stairs continue to the sixth floor, which is built at the original building’s roof level. This new floor has pitched wood slat ceilings and contains a flexible 268-occupant conference and event centre. SNFL now also delivers to the Midtown cityscape a sensational new public roof attraction with a striking sculptural addition. An L-shaped roof terrace runs above the 40th Street and Fifth Avenue facades and includes a roof garden and an adjacent indoor café. It is Manhattan’s only free, publicly accessible roof terrace and offers staggering views.
Above the sixth floor, a dramatic new roof slopes up to cover mechanical equipment, reaching 56m (184 feet) above street level. Its angled pitches, and patinated copper-colored surface, are inspired by Manhattan’s Beaux Art copper-clad mansard roofs, two 1904 examples of which are visible from the terrace. As a new native New Yorker, the form also nods to the tapering spires of New York’s art deco skyscrapers and faceted facades of its newer towers.