Furness Library

About this property

The Fisher Fine Arts Library was the primary library of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia from 1891 to 1962. The red sandstone, brick-and-terra-cotta Venetian Gothic giant, part fortress and part cathedral, was designed by Philadelphia architect Frank Furness (1839–1912). The cornerstone was laid in October 1888, construction was completed in late 1890, and the building was dedicated in February 1891. Following completion of the Van Pelt Library in 1962, it was renamed the Furness Building (after its architect), and housed the university's art and architecture collections. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985. The Furness Building was renamed the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library following a six-year, $16.5-million restoration, completed in 1991. It is located on the east side of College Green, at Locust Walk and 34th Street. The library's plan is exceptionally innovative: circulation to the building's five stories is through the tower's staircase, separated from the reading rooms and stacks. The Main Reading Room is a soaring four-story brick-and-terra-cotta-enclosed space, divided by an arcade from the two-story Rotunda Reading Room. The latter has a basilica plan – with seminar rooms grouped around an apse (like side-chapels) – the entire space lighted by clerestory windows. Above the Rotunda Reading Room is a two-story lecture hall, now an architecture studio. The Main Reading Room, with its enormous skylight and wall of south-facing windows, acts as a lightwell, illuminating the surrounding inner rooms through leaded glass windows. The three-story fireproof stacks are housed in a modular iron wing, with a glass roof and glass-block floors to help light the lower levels. It was designed to initially hold 100,000 books – but also to be continuously expandable, one bay at a time, with a movable south wall. Furness's perspective drawing highlighted this growth potential by showing nine-bay stacks, although the initial three-bay stacks were never expanded. Throughout the building are windows inscribed with quotations from Shakespeare, chosen by Horace Howard Furness (Frank's older brother), a University lecturer and a preeminent American Shakespearean scholar of the 19th century. The architect collaborated with Melvil Dewey, creator of the Dewey Decimal System, and others to make this the most modern American library building of its time. "The plans I sketched with Mr. Furness late that evening, seem to me better than any college library has yet adopted." — Melvil Dewey. The Henry Charles Lea Library, a two-story addition to the building's east side, was designed by Furness, Evans & Company and completed in 1905.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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