As I got ready to tour the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University (NCSU), Raleigh, last spring, as part of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) meeting held nearby, the buzz about the newly unveiled building had reached such a level that I expected to find it, however cool, overhyped.
It wasn’t. It was exactly the right amount of hyped.
“Every corner of the Hunt Library is designed to be memorable and stunning,” the library’s vision claims. Grandiose as that might sound, those corners deliver.
In an era in which many libraries even at great institutions are struggling to do enough with less, it’s refreshing to see a university able and willing to invest in the library as both the symbolic and the operational core of the institution. The project was funded by $115.2 million in state appropriations, plus donor support.