Langston Hughes Library
The Langston Hughes Library is a private non-circulating library designed by Maya Lin, and located on the Haley Farm in Clinton, Tennessee. It contains a 5,000-volume reference collection focusing on works by African-American authors and illustrator, and books focused on the Black experience.
Haley farm was once owned by writer Alex Haley, and was purchased by the Children’s Defense Fund in 1994. It is now run as a retreat center, with training and conference facilities, the Riggio-Lynch Interfaith Chapel, guest cottages, and the library. The farm consists of 157 acres (0.64 km2) surrounded by ridges of the Appalachian mountains, and is 25 miles (40 km) north of Knoxville. The grounds of the farm include streams, a lake, an apple orchard, and a ropes course.
The Langston Hughes Library was dedicated on March 19, 1999. The dedication ceremony was attended by such important figures as Maya Angelou, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Franklin, and Toni Morrison. The Children’s Defense Fund and its sister organization, the Black Community Crusade for Children, run this library "as an incubator for the CDF’s “Leave No Child Behind” movement.
The Library is a 1,200 square foot 2-story building with a single reading room upstairs and entryway and a small bookstore in the south corn crib. The reading room was designed to be a flexible space, allowing for public readings or personal study areas, as needed.
An 1860s refurbished barn and two corn cribs comprise the exterior skin of the building. The rustic exterior, which evokes the “architectural vernacular of 19th-century East Tennessee, a plain language of silvery, time-worn siding, rough logs, and minimal geometries” is melded with modern Shaker-like simplicity on the interior.
Maya Lin pointed out that the function of the exterior and that of the interior were different and thus she "wanted to make a real cut between outside and inside…there didn't seem to be much point in preserving the rustic feel of the barn's interior”.
One of the most striking aspects of the design are the glass-encased corn cribs that act as a base for the cantelievered barn that sits atop them. Margaret Butler of Martella Associates states that the glass between the logs "glows like a Chinese lantern" at night.
The Library was designed by Maya Lin, most famous for her Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington DC., and who also created the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, AL. Martella Associates, Knoxville, were the architect of record.
Lin explains her vision: "The idea was to maintain the integrity and character of the old barn yet introduce a new inner layer…expressing the idea of a separate inner skin slipping inside the old barn". "I'd never seen a shape like that before and wanted to save it….once I realized that the book collection was small and the library would be used as an intimate gathering space, I came up with the concept of an elevated reading room".
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