University of Michigan Law School
The building you studied in is not the building your classmates studied in. It has been outgrown, argued over, buried underground, and it is about to change again. Scroll through its life, and tell us which version is yours.
Where we're starting
Every generation of Michigan lawyers has been handed a library that was already running out of room. That is why there are now four of them stacked into one corner of the Law Quadrangle.
The Reading Room of 1931. A stacks wing bolted on when the shelves overflowed. Four more floors added on top of that. And then, in 1981, a decision no one quite expected: put the next library under the lawn.
What follows is that story, drawn from the University's own 2023 architectural study of the Underground Law Library, including construction photographs most alumni have never seen. Six questions are folded into it, and the answers go back to the Law School.
1924–1931
The Lawyers Club opened in 1924, the John P. Cook dormitories in 1930, the Legal Research Building and its Reading Room in 1931, Hutchins Hall in 1933. A complete Gothic world, funded largely by one benefactor: William W. Cook.
As Legal Research was being planned there was agreement it should be monumental and seat 500 students. There was no agreement at all about books. The design provided stacks for 48,000 volumes at a moment when the collection already held 70,000. Cook disputed the school's growth projections and opposed adding more. Only after his death was a six-level Stacks Wing folded into the construction.
The library opened already behind. It has been catching up ever since.
Aerial View of Law Quadrangle, 2005. U-M Library Digital Collections, Bentley Image Bank, Bentley Historical Library. The open lawn at centre-right is the roof of the Underground Law Library.
Books were jammed in the basement. Books stood in stacks on the floor. Books were crowding the stairwells. The Law School desperately needed a bigger library. James Tobin · "The Law School Goes Under"
By 1970 the collection had outgrown the building for the third time. By the mid-1970s it had grown to more than four times the capacity of Legal Research. Something had to be built. The question was where, and the alumni revered the Quad.
1974–1981
Early schemes put a third of the new library above ground. They were rejected because a building there would hide the Gothic presence of Legal Research and close the lawn. The answer was to put all of it underground, and then engineer the daylight back in.
The thing worth protecting
Two light wells cut into the site. The north one is an L-shaped trench, 160 feet long, wrapping the corner of Legal Research: a V in cross-section, glass on one wall, sloping limestone on the other, bouncing daylight down three storeys.
Inside, yard-deep mirrored mullions act as baffles. They cut the glare, and they refract something better: oblique, unexpected views back up at the Gothic building above you. You are thirty-nine feet underground, looking at a cathedral.
The 2023 study calls this the building’s primary success, and says the light and the views "must be preserved and enhanced" in any renovation.
Legal Research Building seen from the Underground Law Library, 2016. James Haefner Photography.
Atrium, 2007. U-M Library Digital Collections, Bentley Image Bank, Bentley Historical Library. Lin Z. Jones Photography.
Probably the most esthetically satisfying large underground building to have penetrated American soil. Andrea Oppenheimer Dean · AIA Journal, 1983
In 1985 it won the Award of Excellence in library architecture from the American Institute of Architects and the American Library Association. It has been published in eighteen national and international architectural journals.
1984–2016
The Subs were designed around a single assumption: that legal research meant physical access to books. Carrels you could lock your volumes into. Shelves at arm's reach. Staff woven in among the stacks.
Lexis and Westlaw launched while the building was still on the drawing board. It took nearly three decades for online research to become universal, but when it did, the logic of the whole floor plan dissolved.
View from Sub-1 West Corridor looking east toward the Circulation Desk, 1984. U-M Library Digital Collections, Bentley Image Bank, Bentley Historical Library.
A hundred years, sideways
The building in 2022
In 2022 the University commissioned a full survey. It found a structurally sound building doing a job that no longer exists.
There is no obvious way in. You cannot find the entrance from outside, and the most direct route is a steep stair that projects awkwardly into the Reading Room. For a wheelchair user the path runs through two separate elevators in obscure locations joined by what the report calls "labyrinthian" corridors.
Summer humidity is high enough that books stick to the wooden shelves. Water gets in at the south light well. Most of the electrical system is original and past its service life. The restrooms are not accessible.
The stools along the glass are uncomfortable, and the designers never meant them to be a destination. They are still the most popular seats in the building, because they have daylight and a view out.
Typical arrangement of open tables, carrels and book stacks, 2022. Hartman-Cox Architects.
Entry staircase connecting Legal Research to the ULL's Sub-1, 2022. Hartman-Cox Architects.
The proposal
The 2023 study recommends a Collegiate Gothic entry building on Monroe Street serving the whole Law Library, linked to Legal Research by a glazed loggia, with an elevator running straight down to Sub-1. The awkward stair comes out of the Reading Room and the room is restored to its original form.
Below ground, the entire collection consolidates onto Sub-3 in compact shelving. The upper two floors open up: reading tables turned so no one has their back to the light, group study rooms, acoustically sealed rooms for interviews, librarians behind glass where students can actually find them.
Bird's eye view of the proposed entrance, 2023. Hartman-Cox Architects / Integrated Design Solutions.
Sub-1 today, and the same floor as proposed.
2022 · As built
Proposed
Left: view of existing librarians' offices in Sub-1 from the corridor. Right: proposed view from the Sub-1 west corridor looking east. Hartman-Cox Architects / Integrated Design Solutions, 2023.
One last thing
Every previous one was shaped by people who had studied here and had opinions about what it should be, including the 1931 argument about how many books would ever be needed. That conversation is open again.