Avery Library

Located at the heart of Columbia's Morningside Heights campus, Avery Library is the largest architecture library in the nation, housing one of the most comprehensive collections in architecture and related disciplines, including art history, urban design, and fine arts. It contains over 500,000 volumes and more than two million visual resources. This story map will reveal the early development and later modifications of Avery Library and its construction method, at the end of the map we will be looking at the source of the building materials as a comparative tool to examine the embodied carbon of Avery Library.

Pre - Columbia Era

Morningside Heights was originally inhabited by the Lenape people before European settlers arrived in the 17th century. The area was then used primarily as farmland with few farmhouses by the Dutch and British settlers. In the early 19th century, the Society of the New York Hospital purchased substantial land on the Morningside Heights Plateau as the new site for its asylum, later known as the Bloomingdale Asylum. The asylum plan drew its border following the contour of the plateau and later Columbia developed its new campus within the same parameters.

Upper Campus

Columbia University had been based in Midtown Manhattan before the relocation. However, by the end of the 19th century, the university's existing facilities were insufficient to meet its needs. Under the lead of President Seth Low, Columbia initiated a strategic expansion plan to accommodate its growing student body and the need for a large, modern campus. In 1892, the university purchased a large plot of land from the Bloomingdale Asylum and commissioned the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White to design the new campus. Charles Follen McKim, a prominent architect from the firm, envisioned a campus in Beaux-Arts style, featuring classical architectural elements and an orderly layout that emphasized symmetry and grandeur.

A New Architecture Library

Avery Library was established in 1890 through a gift from Samuel Putnam Avery in memory of his son Henry, an architect. The library was originally located at Columbia's Forty-ninth Street campus. After the university's move to Morningside Heights, the library initially occupied a room in Low Library, which now houses the Columbia Collection. In 1906, Samuel Putnam Avery Jr. donated funds for a dedicated building to house the library's rapidly expanding collections. While the first level maintained its built purpose as a library, the upper floors were temporarily occupied by the School of Architecture until the library needed the extra space.

Unlike most of classical Beaux-Art buildings with masonry bearing wall system, Avery Library is a hybrid construction consisting of steel-frame structure and masonry claddings. The building is site on a 150 x 50 concrete foundation with 158 grillage beams as support, the skeleton of the building is made of numbers of steel beams. Exterior façade is mostly Harvard Bricks cladded with limestone trims and granite base. Interior partitions are made of a single layer of terra cotta tile and finished with 3 layers of coating and plaster.

4th Floor Total Embodied Carbon: 89.9 TCO2

The material map shows the source of the major building materials that were used in the construction of Avery Library and their relative distance to the site. This helps us visualize the distance required for those materials traveled from the factory to the construction site and the carbon emission in the transportation process as well as how it contributed to the overall embodied carbon of Avery Library.

process

The major structural components, such as steel columns and beams have a life span of over 100 years, but other architectural components may confront reconstruction. The layout of the partition wall changes and each change incurred a layer of embodied carbon in the building. The 1912 original design used terra cotta, and all later construction used steel studs. Over 60 years, we used steel stud replacement value to calculate the total embodied carbons of partition wall construction which is 11.9 tons, and that is still less than the 14.6 tons of Granite, which has the least embodied carbon. Although the number could be insignificant compared to structural components, it could add a layer of information on the total carbon when we put it in trajectory over a longer time span, if such reconstruction takes place regularly.