When a civilization ends, it does not leave behind a tombstone. Instead, it leaves stackings of stones (i.e. buildings.) We lose the remembrance of individual people, the things they said, did, and wrote, but we remember what they built because those things endure for much longer. The Ancient Greeks and Romans tell us about themselves through their Classical Architecture. We remember the Medieval period in Europe from its castles and Gothic Cathedrals. We remember the early 20th century from the Art Deco buildings it left behind. The style tells us something about their priorities, what they believed, what they knew, and what their hopes were. In a sense, the buildings a culture leaves behind are a kind of epitaph.
Let’s look through the structural epitaphs of our ancestors.
___________________________
Among public buildings, libraries are sometimes overlooked with respect to their art and architecture. When they are built well though, they became tourism attractions in their own right (or at the least, the feature building on a place’s postcards.) One such tourism attraction is a library on the campus of the University of Oklahoma.
Bizzell Memorial Library
The library is constructed in the University’s unique “Cherokee Gothic” style. What is Cherokee Gothic you might ask?
Cherokee Gothic is a term coined by Frank Lloyd Wright for a vernaculararchitectural style used on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. The term was invented by Wright while on a tour of the school’s grounds, and, when coined, applied to Bizzell Memorial Library and Evans Hall. These buildings combined conventional Gothic and Native American elements. The buildings were constructed in dark and pale bricks and featured a decorative Gothic facade with light-gray stone buttresses and statues.
More recently, new construction under former university president David Boren have been designed to resemble and evoke the earlier Cherokee Gothic buildings. Buildings in the style resemble Collegiate Gothic structures found on other campuses, although they are made from brick and light stone.
The entire main campus (or near enough) at the University of Oklahoma is constructed in this unique style, and as a result, OU is a bit of a diamond in the rough where on-campus architecture is concerned in the United States. The aforementioned library was the launch point for all of that wider style choice.
When the university opened in 1890, the university library was located in the only campus building, which was destroyed by fire in 1903. A new library was constructed and opened in 1904, but the university’s needs and collections quickly outgrew a space that was intended to last for decades. The Oklahoma Legislature appropriated $75,000 in 1917 to construct yet another library building that could be expanded in the future, but subsequent legislatures did not appropriate necessary funds to allow the project to move forward.
In 1927, state officials budgeted $500,000 for construction of a new, three-story library. New facilities included a “treasure room” to hold rare books and special collections and separate spaces for graduate and undergraduate work. A reading room, known today as the Great Reading Room, held the bulk of the 105,000 volumes the university then owned. The new library was dedicated on February 21, 1929.
Under George Lynn Cross, the University’s seventh president, a 1958 addition effectively tripled the size of the structure. After a generous donation by Doris W. Neustadt, a 1982 addition was completed during the William S. Banowsky administration.
Presently, Bizzell serves as the flagship research library in the state of Oklahoma and of the University’s system of eight libraries on the Norman campus that hold a combined 5 million volumes. Bizzell also houses the University Libraries administration; the History of Science, Nichols Rare Books, Bass Business and Bizzell Bible Special Collections; and the University of Oklahoma School of Library and Information Studies. The University of Oklahoma Library System is a member of the Association of Research Librarieso.
Desegregation landmark
The Great Reading Room in 2006.
The library is historically significant for its association with the racial desegregation court case of George McLaurin, a retired black professor who applied to the university to pursue a doctorate in education. McLaurin was at first denied admission to the university solely on the basis of race, in accordance with Oklahoma law at the time. After a court ruling, he was admitted, but under the separate but equal doctrine he was given a desk in the mezzanine of this building, rather than being allowed use of the regular reading room. He appealed the segregation up to the Supreme Court, in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. In this, and a companion cases, Sweatt v. Painter, the Supreme Court limited Plessy v. Ferguson. The decisions were precedents for the more famous Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954.
For its association with segregation and the court case overturning it, the building was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2001.
I am happy to say that while much of the U.S. is built without any regard for beauty, that has largely not been true on American college campuses – at least not in recent decades. There are a lot of forces driving that and not all of them are good. But the bright side is that if you’re a prospective student, or tourist, in the United States, and your thing is architecture, you are likely to find stare-worthy buildings at our places of higher learning.
The library above is beautiful throughout its interior also – and I would know having spent many years inside of it. For a great virtual tour, I recommend you visit the embedded videos below. Unfortunately, the tour does not spend much time focusing on the building’s rich, warm, soft leather couches (excellent for naps), the ideal bookish smell, or the coffee shop at its bottom level (The Bookmark Cafe) wherein in a single badly planned semester, long ago, I once read approximately 40 classic novels:
