MSSA Reading Room, Yale University, USA | Blog

The Sterling Memorial Library, Yale’s mid-century Gothic masterpiece with a distinct flavour of Giles Gilbert Scott’s University Library in Cambridge England, library design which was built at the same time, is not quite the University’s architectural centrepiece – the Memorial Quadrangle by James Gamble Rogers, also the Sterling’s architect, with its 200-foot Perpendicular Gothic Harkness Tower owing much to England’s ‘Boston Stump’ generally holds that title – but library and Quadrangle together form the linchpins of the University’s Gothic Revival campus.

This space represents the beating heart of the University itself, the place where the most precious pieces of its intellectual legacy reside, and in which the emotional attachment of those same generations of academics is cumulatively invested. This was a project the team at Luke Hughes could not turn down.

Custom reading and teaching tables and the Luke Hughes Folio stacking timber chair are the major standard furniture items. To provide a naturally protective surface for delicate documents the tops have linoleum insets. 

For more information: 

Photos © Christopher Gardner.

Enjoy the article? Delve deeper into Luke Hughes & Company’s place in the Arts and Crafts tradition with the fascinating new book 'Furniture in Architecture' . Available through Thames & Hudson