Archinect - Features

Digital Library, Analog Building: The Story of Rand Hall (Chapter 5)

2018-06-19T10:00:00-04:00

Chapter 5: Halfway Point No (Fire) Escape

Prior to 1968, Rand Hall contained a single staircase located at the center of the building. That year the first floor of Rand Hall was renovated and the second floor was repartitioned for the Center for Research in Education. With only one mode of egress, the building did not comply with the fire safety regulations of New York State that required two exits at either end of a floor. An emergency stair tower was added to the eastern edge of the building and a three foot wide unobstructed corridor from one side of the building to the other. In another 50 years, the stair tower would be removed in favor of an interior staircase with the design of the new addition.

Digital Library, Analog Building: The Story of Rand Hall (Chapter 4)

2018-04-13T09:00:00-04:00

Chapter 4: Second Action Second Renovation

Rooms for data processor and faculty offices were installed on the first floor of Rand Hall for the Cornell Computer Center in 1959. Additional interior walls were erected to expand the office spaces on the west end of the second floor of Rand Hall. Today, the digitized collection of the entire library can be contained within the memory of a hard drive smaller than the size of a single book. But in 1959, the physical space required by a digitized library would have occupied more area than a traditional library of book stacks containing the same amount of information.

Digital Library, Analog Building: The Story of Rand Hall (Chapter 3)

2018-03-06T08:00:00-05:00

Chapter 3: First Action First Renovation

Non load-bearing partitions were added between the columns to create spaces for offices and seminar rooms on the east side of the second floor of Rand Hall in 1952. Earlier that year, Buckminster Fuller built a twenty foot diameter geodesic dome with students on the roof of Rand Hall that acted as an inverted planetarium. But what had been intended as a permanent fixture on top of the building was destroyed by vandals on Halloween night. Although the structure no longer exists on top of Rand Hall, it is well documented in the extensive Fuller Archives.

Digital Library, Analog Building: The Story of Rand Hall (Chapter 2)

2018-01-16T09:00:00-05:00

Chapter 2: Inciting Incident, Inciting Building

Before the construction of Rand Hall, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, gifted his architectural library to establish the Department of Architecture in 1876. That same year the American Library Association was formed. It marked a turning point in the way university libraries managed their collections and controlled access of their materials to faculty, students, and the public.