Sterling Memorial Library

Sterling Memorial Library
Facade and tower of Sterling Memorial Library
General information
Type	Library
Architectural style	Collegiate Gothic
Address	120 High Street
Town or city	New Haven, Connecticut
Country	USA
Completed	1930
Opened	April 1931
Cost	$8,000,000
Owner	Yale University
Height	150 feet (46 m)
Technical details
Floor count	16
Floor area	441,651 square feet (41,030.7 m2)
Design and construction
Architect	James Gamble Rogers
Website
web.library.yale.edu/building/sterling-library

Sterling Memorial Library is the main library building of the Yale University Library system in New Haven, Connecticut. Opened in 1931, the library was designed by James Gamble Rogers as the centerpiece of Yale's Gothic Revival campus. It is elaborately ornamented, featuring extensive sculpture and painting as well as hundreds of panes of stained glass created by G. Owen Bonawit. In addition to five large reading rooms, a Music Library, and courtyard on the ground floor, the library's tower has sixteen levels of bookstacks containing over 4 million volumes. It connects via tunnel to the underground Bass Library, which contains an additional 150,000 volumes.

For the ninety years prior to the construction of Sterling Memorial Library, Yale's library collections had been held in the College Library, a chapel-like Gothic Revival building on Yale's Old Campus now known as Dwight Hall. Built to house a collection of 40,000 books in the 1840s, and later expanded to Linsly Hall and Chittenden Hall, the old library could not hold Yale's swelling book collection, which had grown to over one million volumes. In 1918, Yale received a $17-million bequest from John W. Sterling, founder of the New York law firm Shearman & Sterling, providing that Yale construct "at least one enduring, useful and architecturally beautiful edifice." The largest bequest in the history of any American university, it initiated a major period of construction on Yale's central campus. Because of the library collection's growth, the university decided to make the centerpiece of Sterling's gift a new library with a capacity for 3.5 million volumes.

The building's original architect, Bertram Goodhue, intended the library to resemble his State Capitol Building in Lincoln, Nebraska, with the library's books in a prominent tower. When Goodhue died in 1924, the project passed to James Gamble Rogers, the university's consulting architect. Originally, Rogers planned to balance the library with a 5,000-seat chapel on the opposite end of Cross Campus' main axis, but the absence of a financier and the end of compulsory undergraduate chapel services in 1926 scuttled the project. Instead, Rogers circumscribed Goodhue's tower plan with an "ecclesiastical metaphor": a cathedral plan, in Roger's words, "as near to modern Gothic as we dared to make it." He modeled the library's entrance hall to resemble a vaulted nave and commissioned extensive stained glass and stone ornament to decorate the building's interior.