Phillips Exeter Academy Library

The Phillips Exeter Academy Library was designed by Louis Kahn for the private secondary school in Exeter, New Hampshire, and completed in 1971 as one of Kahn's late masterworks. The building's plan places book stacks in a windowless inner concrete ring around a soaring central atrium, reading carrels along an outer brick perimeter lit by tall arched windows, and a circulation zone of stairs and walkways between the two, a layered organization Kahn described as protecting books from direct sunlight while giving readers natural light at the building's edges. The atrium itself rises the full height of the building beneath a skylight, its walls interrupted by large circular openings, cut through diagonal concrete cross-bracing, that give views into the stacks from the open central space. Kahn clad the building's exterior in brick laid with deep, precisely detailed joints, a material choice matching the campus's older Georgian buildings while the interior concrete structure remained frankly modern. The library is widely regarded as one of the finest library buildings of the twentieth century and a defining statement of Kahn's mature architectural philosophy.