The Nasher Museum of Art

Realizing that students are collaborating more than ever, planners have integrated not only large public spaces, but also smaller, more intimate gathering places into many of the new buildings. The Bostock Library, for example, has nine group-study rooms, where students can meet to collaborate on homework assignments and projects, and seven larger reading rooms, as well as informal study spaces in the corridors that run through the archway between Perkins and Bostock. Like the new stacks, these spaces are well-stocked with comfortable, upholstered furniture, painted in warm colors, and blessed with both natural light and wireless access. They stand in welcome contrast to the Perkins stacks--initially designed to be a closed-stacks system--with their concrete floors and fluorescent lighting.

Throughout the planning stages, library officials and architects focused on the challenge of maintaining the library's relevance in a culture characterized by the rise of the Internet, laptop computers, and wireless communications. Now that students engaged in research can access a wealth of resources--sitting at a desk in a dorm room or a table in Satisfaction, an off-campus hangout--planners realized that, to draw them in, the library would have to evolve beyond its traditional functions of simply providing books and research materials.

So far, the new space has proved effective. Thomas Wall, director of public services for the library system, says that library use on campus is already 40 percent higher than during the same period last year; circulation is up 30 percent. The group-study rooms, in particular, have become so popular that students say they have trouble finding one that's unoccupied. As a result, library officials are rethinking plans for the upcoming renovation of Perkins Library in order to add more of those kinds of spaces.

As Duke's new buildings take on functions vastly different from their primary purpose--or more accurately, seek to serve that purpose in new ways--structures that are very different in theory develop surprising similarities. Just as a library is no longer solely a place to store books and study in silence, a dormitory now provides much more than just housing. The new Bell Tower Residence Hall includes two classrooms and numerous study rooms, as well as a Duke police substation and a branch of student health services.

Likewise, the new Nasher Museum of Art is more than a place to display paintings and sculpture. Much of the early praise for the Nasher has been a response to its soaring glass atrium and the elegant gathering place that it encloses. It's "almost like an Italian piazza, where coming is an exciting experience." observes Anne Schroder, an associate curator.

But she and other museum officials hope that the excitement will extend to the spaces created within the museum to accommodate teaching and research in ways the old museum could not. For formal class meetings and lectures, the museum boasts a small, wood-paneled lecture hall and a seminar room with floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides. In the Nasher's basement are three large storage rooms devoted to objects, paintings, and works on paper, respectively, but also equipped with space to host classes of fifteen students for up-close viewings of art that would otherwise be shelved awaiting display.

This semester, ZoÎ Kontes, a visiting assistant professor of classical studies, is making good use of the rooms for her class on Greek art and architecture. She knows firsthand the benefit of these types of spaces. As a doctoral student in old-world archaeology and art at Brown University, she made an important discovery, thanks to similar facilities at Brown's neighbor, the Rhode Island School of Design.

She was assigned to study a fragmentary Roman statue thought to be a copy of a Greek Diadoumenos, an athlete putting on a headband. But after examining the piece up close, she realized that it had been wrongly identified.

"Being able to see an ancient object that's not enclosed in a glass case, or even one you can actually hold, is really exciting for students," she says. "It gives you a connection with the objects in a more real way."