Princeton's Gehry Library Banishes Stacks, Encourages Talking

The Peter B. Lewis Science Library at Princeton University features the signature hand of Frank Gehry. But where are the books?

The stacks you'd expect to find in a building housing collections as varied as astrophysics, biology and statistics have largely been banished to a surprisingly small high-density storage space in the basement.

The New Jersey university, with Gehry Partners LLC, has embarked on a difficult task: to reinvent the library for an age when information largely takes on electronic rather than print form.

In fact, books are hard to come by in this library.

Numerous group-study rooms encourage collaboration. The most prominent is what the Gehry team has dubbed the ``treehouse,'' because its arcing, overlapping ceiling forms tuck themselves among mature trees. With large tables, it resembles an upscale dining hall more than a reading room, and may prove just as noisy and freewheeling.

The Lewis just opened for the fall term and it's too early to tell if it will become Princeton's central focus of scientific inquiry. Other universities are watching, worrying about the silence gathering about their own book stacks.