Roasting the Class of 1945 Library
By FORREST ZENG ‘26
Did you know that the same guy designed both Elm and the Library? That’s right! Your boy Louis Kahn, legendary architect and red brick fanboy. But don’t you ever notice that when you enter the library, you feel less inclined to read a book and more to rip one apart? Today, I, as a conceited amateur architect, will point out all the flaws in the red-brick brutalist building we call the library.
A library needs to be full of books. And our library is full of books! But what’s the first thing you see when you walk onto the first floor? Four glowing holes on the sides of the hall. Sometimes I forget that I’m in a library, and not in the belly of a futuristic spaceship! Don’t forget the dull, storm-cloud gray concrete that fills every crevice of that building. Are we in the belly of a granite monster or the largest high school library in the world? Sometimes I swear I can see Darth Sidius’s face in those oppressive and steely towers undergirding this giant beast of a library. Is this a black and white film? Brutalist much?
And also the piano. Imagine being that piano. Layers of dust, only ever cleared twice a year for the occasional “casual” concert that nobody really attends. Or, when annoying preps want to show off their exceptional pianism to their friends and jump scare everyone with horrible renditions of pop songs. Have some pity on the poor instrument.
The part of the library technically most similar to a real spaceship is the archives. There are literally century old maps drawn at the cusp of the Age of Exploration in the 16th century, selections from Thomas Jefferson’s library (yes, that Jefferson), and copies of The Exonian all the way to the beginning. That’s cool—but unfortunately, too few people care! Apparently, there are rooms in the archives that literally turn into a vacuum and automatically spray retardant if there is a fire! At the same time, in the Elm dining hall, you’re complaining about your crude cheese sandwich getting burned in the panini press. Pretentious much?
The amount of graffiti in the library verges on obscene. It’s almost like a social media app. If you know where to look, you’ll find the juiciest gossip, craziest jokes written in the spur of panicked essay writing, and even confessions of guilt. No need to make an account on the free speech forum called LibraryGram—you’ll get the inside scoop on everything on campus whether you’d like it or not!
Now this one might be a bit of an off-the-shelf joke (every pun intended), but someone please explain to me the book sorting system. I’ll be looking for a book in the 700s section, and for the love of all things literature, I just can’t seem to find it on the shelves. Then, I’ll realize that apparently, it’s a “folio” book, so it belongs in one of the special shelves on a different floor! So I travel there, and lo and behold . . . nothing. Just a bunch of random books about South American geography, not what I was looking for! But then, I discover—there are also shelves inserted next to windows on the third floor that also hold folios. Naturally, I’ll spend thirty minutes parsing through those—and turn up empty-handed again. The library just wants me to fail my research paper.
Oh well. The library is beautiful regardless of how difficult it might be. One day we’ll find ourselves missing the monstrous echo in the staircases, the stuffy corner rooms on each floor, and ancient, unreadable copies of Shakespeare’s Hamlet dotted across the archives. Not today, though.
