Shelf Belief

There’s much suspense at Cornell University’s newly designed fine arts library.

- Eva Hagberg

‘Knowledge is something which doesn’t have a weight,’ Wolfgang Tschapeller says. He’s describing his design for the Mui Ho Fine Arts Library at Cornell, a renovation that opened up an airy space in the university campus’ historic Rand Hall. It is organised around a singular concept: a series of stacks made from metal grate and hung from the ceiling. The books appear to be almost floating, ephemeral.

‘There’s something about the weight and position of the books and stacks; just like knowledge itself, it’s essentially immaterial.’ It’s heady stuff, but the Austrian architect, who graduated from the Cornell School of Architecture and returned in 2014 with a commission to renovate this library, does not shy away from a conceptual approach.

Tschapeller’s intervention is part of the equally heady complex that makes up the College for Art, Architecture and Planning: a constellation of tight-knit buildings that also includes Milstein Hall, the architecture school designed in 2011 by OMA, masters of the powerful, concept-driven approach.