My Favorite Yale Library Sucks
Does the Reference Library of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) have a long-winded name? Bet. Was it designed by a lauded modernist who had three children with three women and never told any family about the others? For sure. Is its location convenient only for JE kids? You know it.
If you head over to the YCBA to bang out a last-minute p-set, you’ll have to go home when it hits 4:30 pm. And even if you do gain access to this sacred space, you will not, in fact, be able to eat, drink water, or see anything out of the window but the SigEp backyard — which should be deterring enough on its own.
But I love this space, cherish this space, and plan my schedule around being in this space. I’ve spent three of my cumulative three study hours this semester in the Reference Library because, in spite of the hassle, it is a wonderful place to work.
The YCBA occupies the vast majority of the block delineated by Chapel, York, Crown, and High streets. The museum is Cartesian in proportion; four floors are each cordoned off into twenty-square-foot bays, ten lengthwise and six across. The Reference Library is five bays long by two bays wide, tucked into the far side of the museum’s second floor. To reach it, you ascend a square staircase circumscribed in a concrete cylinder (dystopic but appealingly angular), exit and double back around the cylinder to the Library Court (grandiose and marvelous), where shortly you encounter a door with a glossy steel handle. Entering the library, you scribble your name on the sign-in sheet and then find a spot at one of the many white oak tables and carrels.
The reference library calls for abundantly precise description: the tables are white oak, the floor oatmeal wool carpeting segmented by a band of travertine marble, the triangular wall behind the staff desk stainless steel untouched since it left the factory rollers, so as to better accentuate its irregularities in color and texture. Each region has a specific function, so that to one side of the travertine band you find the served spaces of the reading room, on the other the servant spaces of the book stacks. The former presses against the wall, where fixed panels of Venetian blinds slide into and out of view, depending on scholars’ preferences. The warm and soft composition of the reading room offsets the stacks, where fluorescent lights and metal bookshelves underscore utility.
The YCBA’s Chief Librarian, Craig Binkowski, has written extensively on his workplace of over 10 years. Reading one of his articles, I found a quote by Louis Kahn, the museum’s architect, on the subject of libraries: that they should be spaces where “readers… take the book and go to the light.” Such a belief is legible in the Reference Library, if not literally materialized. And, theory aside, there will always be something compelling about the weird accumulation of soft and hard, natural and fluorescent, and light and a-little-less-light contained in the Reference Library.
So I’ll keep coming back here, to a friendly staff and gentle silence and material comfort, even if my favorite Yale library sucks.
