BOOKISH, BLINKERED
Steven Holl’s Hunters Points Library is the jewel in the Queens Public Library System, an audacious starchitect-designed monument built to serve a growing community. When it opened in the fall of 2019 Michael Kimmelman raved in the Times, calling it “one of the finest public buildings New York has produced this century.” And it is extraordinary when seen from Manhattan, across the East River, and approached on foot from the local subway station. The five-story concrete volume, eroded by gigantic worm-shaped windows, resembles the mute, enigmatic structures in Holl’s iconic watercolors, that lure one through their shadowy passages.
But the magic ends as one steps inside the library.
The worm-shaped windows are overscaled, and set with relation to the floors.
The library’s trays, rising in a “V” from the ground floor entrance, are narrow, squeezed between stairs along its west and east facades that offer expansive river and city views. The circulation, in pinched paths along the railings and staircases, is contorted and cramped. When I wandered through one Saturday morning I came uncomfortably close to patrons perusing the stacks, reading the paper, and studying at tables, and starstruck architects taking pictures. We’re used to this kind of crowding in a city building, but not in a new building, or in a building this large, which frames so much empty space at its center. The library is currently facing ADA claims, which isn’t surprising. It seems to have been planned pictorially – to generate spectacular views within and without – rather than pragmatically.
As a working architect one’s vision is continually tempered by realities of program and budget, and a structure is typically shaped to enclose the minimum square footage required. To design a public building as Holl has, squeezing and scattering its program through narrow plates in an immense volume which could have provided much more, is extravagant. To design a library as Holl has, that offers no welcoming space for reading, studying or resting, is criminal. The building opens itself generously to the outside, but it doesn’t hold people inside.
Photograph by Paul Warchol. Courtesy of Steven Holl Architects.