RESTORATION AND EXPANSION: A rendering of the design by Kimmel Bogrette Archi-tecture + Site for the Historical Studies-Social Science Library at the Institute for Advanced Study. (Illustration courtesy of Kimmel Bogrette)
By Anne Levin
At a special meeting on Thursday evening, October 24, the Princeton Planning Board is scheduled to consider a proposal by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) to add a second level to its existing main library.
Designed by architecture firm Harrison & Abramovitz and dedicated in 1965, the modernist library was built at the request of former IAS Director J. Robert Oppenheimer. Wallace K. Harrison was known for his work on New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House, Rockefeller Center, and the United Nations building. He also designed Jasna Polana, the estate of J. Seward Johnson and his wife, Barbara Piasecka Johnson, on Route 206. more
In the final chapter of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (1916), Stephen Dedalus tells two of his fellow students what happened to a girl who got into a hansom cab “a few days ago” in London. “She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant.”
