The Manhattan Archive and Library

The idea of building a new library in these days of the internet seems almost quaint. Something of a throwback to times when information wasn’t as accessible, yet overwhelming. Certainly the very idea of what is a library and what it can offer society has changed. When speaking of this change of idea, most young architect’s would try to challenge our preconceptions of what a Library is or offer us some theory of information diffusion cast in a formal strategy that expresses to the world, through Architecture the grand and revolutionary changes in the world of information today. Yet does every new building, let alone every library need to be a statement on society, or an expression of the world of information as a whole? Certainly such definitions of the problem are valid and important to the discussion of Architecture, but this is to the detriment of other problems.

The book still hasn’t found its way into the ethereal realm of the digital media. There is vast stores of knowledge locked away in warehouses all around the world; the off site facilities of the major library’s that make up many large Universities collections. In fact there is a trend to off site management of collections, allowing only those most “useful” books to stay in the labyrinth of stacks at such libraries as Avery Library at Columbia University.

The Manhattan Archive and Library is just down the hill from Columbia University at the cross roads of 115th St. and Fredrick Douglass Boulevard (8th Ave.) in New York City. With the strong community of Harlem around it, the Archive serves as a nexus of information in the neighborhood. Part community center, part book digital archiving service, the Archive’s mission statement is about information conductivity. The Archive offers services to communities and universities alike; digitally scanning books and making them accessible via their client’s networks and sharing in each institutions book lending programs.

The Archive remains largely formally silent in its intentions, neither slickly minimal nor conceptually expressive; instead it remains a simple construction. Instead it is rather ordinary, not in the sense of normalcy or banality, but rather as in the ordinary and the singular. Where the singular serves as a defining focus of organization for a given field or system, the ordinary is the connective tissue of the field itself; diffuse yet defined. In this sense, the Archive is part of the neighborhood and the urban fabric, it maintains the street wall and building height of its neighbors, yet separate and defined as something different by its entrance courtyard and separation from the surrounding buildings, giving the building a almost cubic reading.