I don't think I've seen anything come along in North Carolina, in recent years, that people
were as excited about.
They just kind of feel like, "boy, we got something great here, and we're proud of it."
This is a signature building for us, transformative for the way people think about NC State.
The Hunt Library sets a pole out into the future and says, "we're going to be the leading
edge technological university for many, many, many years to come."
The Hunt Library was designed to be an interdisciplinary waypoint, a place that you could being people
together from across the university, a technologically rich library meant to be flexible and to grow
and really breath with technology as it changes.
This is a land grant university that is practical, and we base our curriculum around the real
challenges that society faces.
Whether it's in disciplines like engineering, or textiles, or agriculture.
So, NC State is focused on solving real world problems and using the best technology to
do that, and this library reflects that.
This was our goal—to give the students and faculty at the university a competitive edge,
to have a library that really made a tremendous difference in their education and their research
and something that made them want to be lifetime learners, and so we decided on an iconic building.
The legislators knew this university needed a new library; we let them know that we intended
to have a world competition for the designer.
Our practice began when we won the commission to revive the great library of Alexandria
in Egypt.
Since the completion of that building, we've had an enormous interest in how people learn
and how people interact with each other and informally pass knowledge from one person
to the other.
The best architecture going back in history is how you experience a space, and working
with Snohetta, that's a lot of what we talked about—how are people going to experience
it; not what is it going to look like, what's it going to feel like.
We wanted natural light.
We wanted it to fit in with the North Carolina geography, because it's a very beautiful place.
We have a beautiful spot here.
We also wanted to have large, inspiring spaces, but we wanted to have surprise spaces...you
go around a corner, and the furniture changes, or the type of space changes, and we wanted
to have that element of discovery in the building.
We have over 80 different types of chairs in the Hunt library and dynamic and engaging
colors and modern interactive types of spaces.
The formal quality of the building came from a number of different ways of thinking.
One of them had to do with the history of textile technology on the campus.
In the 1800's, there was a technology developed that allowed textiles to be industrialized,
and it was a specialized kind of loom that used a punch card, and the shapes of these
threads weaving across each other were very interesting to us.
So it's almost as if the building is being threaded together, and that, likewise, is
being threaded into the landscape.
We didn't want to rely on active technology, things like computer equipment or moveable
blinds.
Instead, we looked at more passive technologies, simple features such as orienting the glass
in a particular direction, placing the portions of the building that need sunlight closer
to the facades and the portions that need little sunlight towards the middle, and then
created a simple pattern of louvers that would maintain a more comfortable and controlled
environment inside, without the use of a lot of complex technologies.
The curtain wall is the exterior glass system and the fins, and what they do is...the sun
moves around during the day...they shade that glass so that it lowers the heat level particularly
during the summer
One of the early fundamental decisions we had to make was, "is this building mostly
going to house book stacks in an open arrangement, or are we going to try something different,
to free up a lot of space in the building."
We decided to use the bookBot, which is a much more dense arrangement of the two million
volumes, and the wonderful thing about that decision is that it allowed us to create all
these additional spaces for group study and high tech collaboration that otherwise would
have been occupied by book stacks.
Collaborative spaces are really important, because the way that students are working
now is in collaboration.
Students are really teaching each other; the faculty member is more there as a resource,
as an expert, but not there as just a lecturer.
So they're working in groups, and the library really has to accommodate that.
Having spaces like presentation rooms where students can actually practice, see how they
work, videotape themselves.
White boards, everybody uses them, and you see students' working on these boards, teaching
each other.
One person takes the lead, then another one takes the lead.
We tried to make everything writable that we could.
You'll see lots of glass in the building—all the group studies are glass, glass tables...it's
all meant to be written on.
Students want to be able to hook their laptops up to big displays, and they want to have
access to the computing network on campus.
They want gaming.
They want to be able to have food and drink.
We built upon that to design this library.
The Hunt library model is to bring to the forefront all of this amazing creative technology
to everybody and makes it immediately accessible.
There is a game lab on the third floor that has a 21-foot wide wall display that connects
to every type of game console that you might imagine.
There are rooms that have 270-degree projections.
There are 3D printers.
There are spaces where you can just go and try out ideas inside this technology scope.
There is a very strong software industry here in North Carolina.
No other students in the state will have access to as much technology as they've had access
to here in the Hunt Library
We're starting to get companies that are coming to look at this library and say, "my gosh
we are going to have to step it up to be prepared for the students that come out of NC State."
Some of the folks I work with in the community are talking about this space.
People are already thinking about how their offices may change to reflect some of the
neat things that the Hunt Library has incorporated.
From the day he first spoke to us and the design team, Governor Hunt said this is about
people that are not yet born, that their are those people that will come long after we're
gone that will be influenced in a positive way, we hope, by the development of this structure.
I hope the library means for the University that it helps to recruit and retain the very
best students and the very best faculty and that we are known as a place of excellence
and a place of passion and ideas and vision.
You can't be in this building and not think something's happening at this University.