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New Addition for a New Age

Getting the Mann Library building in shape for the 21st century has been a two-phase process. In 1996, a ground-breaking ceremony presided over by then-Mann director Jan Kennedy Olsen helped launch Phase 1—the construction of the Mann Library addition. The State University of New York Construction Fund (SUCF) provided funding for the project. Chief architect of the new building was Edward Larabee Barnes of New York City, whose simplicity of design and sensitivity to the urban and natural settings of his buildings won him posthumous recognition as the 2007 recipient of the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal award (http://www.architectureweek.com/2007/0117/index.
html). Barnes’ previous projects included the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building in Washington, D.C., the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine.

Construction on the new Mann addition concluded in the spring of 2000 under the architectural direction of the firm Lee & Timchula (formerly Barnes & Lee), who took over the project after Mr. Barnes’ retirement, and Beyhan Karahan and Associates, Architects, P.C., who guided the completion of the building’s interior furnishings. That summer, new Mann Library director Janet McCue and the Mann Library staff welcomed library patrons through the doors of a bright new four-story building. Nicknamed “a high-tech tree house in the woods” by one admiring Cornell faculty member, the new addition takes up a comfortable existence between a distinctly urban courtyard ambience set by towering Bradfield and Emerson Halls on one side, and, on the other, the woods overlooking Cornell’s Beebe Lake.

The Mann addition provided networking, air-conditioning, over 75,000 square feet of space and over 30 new, light-filled rooms for individual and group study. Time and again, students and other patrons have extolled the building as a first-class research facility and study venue (including being named best library space for studying on campus in a 2003 Cornell Sun editorial).

In the words of recent graduate Cailin Moira Wilke ‘06, the addition is “the only place I know where you can study, sleep, do a group project, look out the window to North Campus (often to beautiful snow!), check e-mail, and take classes, all in one day and in a warm, inviting space.”

(Animation by Lee Fritz NYU '08)