While researching the history of the project site, a sliver of Manhattan on Lafayette between Bond and Great Jones, and its relationship to the surrounding neighborhood’s changing urban fabric through layers of time, I learned of its proximity to New York’s historic Marble Cemetery, a cultural and architectural artifact embedded in the modern city. One enters the cemetery from Second Avenue through a long, narrow alley that slips between two brick buildings. At the alley’s end, this processional passageway opens to a walled courtyard of lawn and trees buried in the center of the block. Inside, carved plaques mounted in the stone walls memorialize and record the names and location of those interred in the field of marble vaults below.

Then, with the research completed and my attention turned to the design problem at hand, I realized that the Library, specifically an archive for the history of New York City, serves a parallel function to the cemetery, to contain and preserve the record of the past. At that point, the architectural form came naturally as a "re-construction" of the research. To enter the Library, one walks north-south along two rough-cast walls that shade and shelter the site from the street, reminiscent of the brick party walls that create the alleyway entrance to the Marble cemetery. At the mid-point of the site, a gap between these walls reveals an east-west footbridge spanning across the library's sunken entry court and exterior public space. To the north, a building mass of offices, reading rooms and classrooms rises from the earth. Two and a half stories overhead, the floor of the auditorium crosses the space, giving shelter to the volume of the courtyard. To the south, the library's stacks, contained in a crystalline box, descend into the depths of the site. Its double-curtain wall façade acts to filter diffused light downward and wraps the structure in an atmosphere of silence. Upon entering the archive, the design completely reveals itself through the slip-joint articulation of the cast concrete floors into the supporting steel frame, suggesting the idea of the preserved artifact embedded in a modern context.