Name: The Hunt Library Story
Uploaded: 2014-06-13T00:35:33.000Z
Duration: 8 min 5 s
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I don’t think I’ve seen anything come along in North Carolina, in recent years,

Adverbs of degree

that people were as excited about. They just kind of feel like, “boy, we got something

great here, and we’re proud of it.” This is a signature building for us, transformative

for the way people think about NC State. The Hunt Library sets a pole out into the

future and says, “we’re going to be the leading edge technological university for

many, many, many years to come.” The Hunt Library was designed to be an interdisciplinary

waypoint, a place that you could being people together from across the university, a technologically

rich library meant to be flexible and to grow and really breath with technology as it changes.

This is a land grant university that is practical, and we base our curriculum around the real

challenges that society faces. Whether it’s in disciplines like engineering, or textiles,

or agriculture. So, NC State is focused on solving real world problems and using the

best technology to do that, and this library reflects that.

This was our goal—to give the students and faculty at the university a competitive edge,

to have a library that really made a tremendous difference in their education and their research

and something that made them want to be lifetime learners, and so we decided on an iconic building.

The legislators knew this university needed a new library; we let them know that we intended

to have a world competition for the designer. Our practice began when we won the commission

to revive the great library of Alexandria in Egypt. Since the completion of that building,

we’ve had an enormous interest in how people learn and how people interact with each other

and informally pass knowledge from one person to the other.

The best architecture going back in history is how you experience a space, and working

with Snohetta, that’s a lot of what we talked about—how are people going to experience

it; not what is it going to look like, what’s it going to feel like.

We wanted natural light. We wanted it to fit in with the North Carolina geography, because

it’s a very beautiful place. We have a beautiful spot here. We also wanted to have large, inspiring

spaces, but we wanted to have surprise spaces…you go around a corner, and the furniture changes,

or the type of space changes, and we wanted to have that element of discovery in the building.

We have over 80 different types of chairs in the Hunt library and dynamic and engaging

colors and modern interactive types of spaces. The formal quality of the building came from

a number of different ways of thinking. One of them had to do with the history of textile

technology on the campus. In the 1800’s, there was a technology developed that allowed

textiles to be industrialized, and it was a specialized kind of loom that used a punch

card, and the shapes of these threads weaving across each other were very interesting to

us. So it’s almost as if the building is being threaded together, and that, likewise,

is being threaded into the landscape. We didn’t want to rely on active technology, things

like computer equipment or moveable blinds. Instead, we looked at more passive technologies,

simple features such as orienting the glass in a particular direction, placing the portions

of the building that need sunlight closer to the facades and the portions that need

little sunlight towards the middle, and then created a simple pattern of louvers that would

maintain a more comfortable and controlled environment inside, without the use of a lot

of complex technologies. The curtain wall is the exterior glass system

and the fins, and what they do is…the sun moves around during the day…they shade that

glass so that it lowers the heat level particularly during the summer

One of the early fundamental decisions we had to make was, “is this building mostly

going to house book stacks in an open arrangement, or are we going to try something different,

to free up a lot of space in the building.” We decided to use the bookBot, which is a

much more dense arrangement of the two million volumes, and the wonderful thing about that

decision is that it allowed us to create all these additional spaces for group study and

high tech collaboration that otherwise would have been occupied by book stacks.

Collaborative spaces are really important, because the way that students are working

now is in collaboration. Students are really teaching each other; the faculty member is

more there as a resource, as an expert, but not there as just a lecturer. So they’re

working in groups, and the library really has to accommodate that. Having spaces like

presentation rooms where students can actually practice, see how they work, videotape themselves.

White boards, everybody uses them, and you see students’ working on these boards, teaching

each other. One person takes the lead, then another one takes the lead.

We tried to make everything writable that we could. You’ll see lots of glass in the

building—all the group studies are glass, glass tables…it’s all meant to be written

on. Students want to be able to hook their laptops

up to big displays, and they want to have access to the computing network on campus.

They want gaming. They want to be able to have food and drink. We built upon that to

design this library. The Hunt library model is to bring to the

forefront all of this amazing creative technology to everybody and makes it immediately accessible.

There is a game lab on the third floor that has a 21-foot wide wall display that connects

to every type of game console that you might imagine. There are rooms that have 270-degree

projections. There are 3D printers. There are spaces where you can just go and try out

ideas inside this technology scope. There is a very strong software industry here in

North Carolina. No other students in the state will have access to as much technology as

they’ve had access to here in the Hunt Library We’re starting to get companies that are

coming to look at this library and say, “my gosh we are going to have to step it up to

be prepared for the students that come out of NC State.”

Some of the folks I work with in the community are talking about this space. People are already

thinking about how their offices may change to reflect some of the neat things that the

Hunt Library has incorporated. From the day he first spoke to us and the

design team, Governor Hunt said this is about people that are not yet born, that their are

those people that will come long after we’re gone that will be influenced in a positive

way, we hope, by the development of this structure. I hope the library means for the University

that it helps to recruit and retain the very best students and the very best faculty and

that we are known as a place of excellence and a place of passion and ideas and vision.

You can’t be in this building and not think something’s happening at this University.