Fisher Fine Arts Library- University of Pennsylvania

In 1885 University of Pennsylvania’s new provost, the physician William Pepper, declared that the university would build a new library building specifically designed to manage the torrent of books and periodicals produced by the use of steam-powered presses and cheap wood pulp paper. Pepper appointed Shakespearean scholar Horace Howard Furness to chair the building committee, and Furness appointed his brother Frank to make the design. 

Frank Furness (1839-1912) deserved the job. The architect for three railroad companies and 22 banks, he was the most accomplished designer in the city’s world of commerce and industry, and he knew how to solve modern problems. The university also hired two library consultants: Melvil Dewey of Columbia, famous for his “Decimal System,” and Justin Winsor of Harvard, which in 1877 had built America’s first library book stack.

At the opening in 1891, Horace Howard Furness boasted: “you have the result [of our project] before you, wherein every door and window, gallery and alcove are placed and devised with sole reference to the one dominant idea of a LIBRARY.” Indeed, the clearly articulated functional elements of the building substantiated that claim. 

Like a piece of machinery, each part of the building was designed to serve a specific purpose and to show what it was doing. The generous arches of the portal provided an irresistible welcome. Inside was a pair of huge, clerestory-lit reading rooms, with no distracting outside views. Only a few reference works were shelved there, as almost all the books in the relentlessly growing collection were stored separately, in fireproof, sunlit security in a multi-story, steel-framed, glass-floored, and glass-roofed book stack. Furness intended that the stack, when it was full, would be extended southward, and, indeed, one addition, the Duhring Wing, was built in 1915-1916. 

The great stairway, in its tower, was designed to take visitors up to the galleries of the newly established archaeological museum and to a huge, horseshoe shaped auditorium. In the event, the auditorium was immediately turned over to the museum, and when the museum got its own building in 1899, it became a secondary reading room. In 1962 the books moved to the new Van Pelt Library, and the space was converted to an architecture studio—the one favored by Louis Kahn, who taught at Penn until his death in 1974.

Despite the clear articulation of its sundry functions, the building evinces organic unity, not the mechanical separation of parts. This is chiefly because the forms are large and muscular and, although the materials are various--sandstone, brick, terracotta, tile, and copper—they are all red. 

The design cannot be assigned to any one style—there are Gothic gargoyles, Romanesque arches, and Renaissance masonry patterns. And so it does not invite us to time travel in our heads, as earlier Greek and Gothic Revival buildings did. Instead, the library invites us to encounter it directly, viscerally, in our own time and place. In short, this is a building that seems more inclined to give us a hug than tell us a story.  

Visible additions include the Henry Charles Lea Library, (1923-1925 by Furness’s successor firm) and the 1931 Horace Howard Furness Library (by Robert McGoodwin, now the Arthur Ross Gallery). In 1962 the building was turned over to the Graduate School of Fine Arts (now Weitzman School of Design), which named it the Furness Building and continues to use it as its own library and for studios. It was restored by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates in time for its centenary in 1991, when it was renamed the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library. 

The site was nominated under the name Furness Library, and its historic name is “University Library” – University of Pennsylvania.