The Buried Library — Michigan Law

Never big enough

Chapter 01

A library that has never once been big enough

Every generation of Michigan lawyers was handed a library already running out of room. Four times the school has had to build its way out.

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 nobody quite expected: put the next library underneath the lawn.

What follows comes 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.

The argument

Chapter 02 · 1924–1946

Forty-eight thousand shelves for seventy thousand books

The Lawyers Club opened in 1924, the Cook dormitories in 1930, Legal Research and its Reading Room in 1931, Hutchins Hall in 1933, a complete Gothic world funded largely by one man, William W. Cook.

There was agreement the building should be monumental and seat five hundred 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 projections and opposed adding more. Only after his death was a six-level Stacks Wing folded into the construction.

By 1946 that was full too, and four more floors went on top.

48,000 Volumes the first design made room for, at a moment when the collection already held 70,000. Cook fought the extra stacks until his death.

Aerial view of the Law Quadrangle in autumn

Chapter 03

Books were crowding the stairwells

James Tobin, “The Law School Goes Under”

By 1970 the collection had outgrown the building for the third time. By the mid-1970s it was four times what Legal Research could hold.

So they dug

Chapter 04 · 1974–1981

The site was the Quad’s last open corner

Early schemes put a third of the library above ground. They were rejected because a building there would hide the Gothic presence of Legal Research and close the lawn.

Gunnar Birkerts and Associates took the commission and gave back a building with almost nothing above the grass: an L-shaped trench 160 feet long, glass on one wall, sloping limestone on the other, throwing daylight three storeys down.

Construction ran through 1979 and 1980, right against the foundations of a 1931 building. The light well is held by concrete piles built shoulder to shoulder, tied back into the earth beneath Legal Research itself.

The excavation for the Underground Law Library in 1979

Crane and formwork on the site in 1979 with Legal Research standing above

1980 section drawing through the Underground Law Library and Legal Research

$9.5m Raised entirely from Law School alumni and private donors. 77,000 square feet, three levels, room for up to 475,000 volumes. Opened 1981 and named for Allan and Alene Smith.

The magic

Chapter 05

Thirty-nine feet underground, looking at a cathedral

Yard-deep mirrored mullions run across the light well as baffles. They cut the glare, and they refract oblique, unexpected views back up at the Gothic building standing over you.

The 2023 study calls this the building’s primary success: the light and the views must be preserved and enhanced in any renovation.

Looking up at the Gothic Legal Research building through the angled glass of the underground library

The three-level atrium of the Underground Law Library

"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.

Chapter 06

A hundred years, sideways

Drag the strip. If you told us your era, your years are marked.

← Scroll the timeline →

Forty years

Chapter 07 · The survey of 2022

A sound building doing a job that no longer exists

The Subs were built around one assumption: that research meant physical access to books. Lexis and Westlaw launched while the building was still being drawn.

There is no obvious way in. You cannot find the entrance from outside, and the most direct route is a steep stair projecting awkwardly into the Reading Room. For a wheelchair user the path runs through two separate elevators 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 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.

520Study seats today, 200 of them enclosed carrels

0Group study rooms in the entire building

88Sub-3 carrels reserved for journal students, now largely unused

Typical arrangement of open tables, carrels and book stacks

The entry staircase from Legal Research down to Sub-1

What's next

Chapter 08 · The proposal

A door on Monroe Street

A Collegiate Gothic entry building 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 collection consolidates onto Sub-3 in compact shelving. The upper two floors open up: reading tables turned so nobody has their back to the light, group study rooms, sealed rooms for interviews, librarians behind glass where students can find them.

Rendering of the proposed entrance seen from Monroe Street looking northeast

Bird's eye rendering of the proposed new entrance

Chapter 09

The next version isn't designed yet

Every previous one was shaped by people who had studied here and had opinions, including the 1931 argument about how many books would ever be needed. That conversation is open again.