Phillips Exeter Academy Library

Phillips Exeter Academy Library is the library of Phillips Exeter Academy, an independent boarding school in Exeter, New Hampshire, and is the largest secondary school library in the world, holding 160,000 volumes over nine levels with a shelf capacity of 250,000 volumes. When the school's earlier library outgrew its building in the 1950s, the commission for a new library with a contemporary design was given to the architect Louis Kahn in 1965, and the building opened in 1971, later receiving the American Institute of Architects Twenty-five Year Award in 1997. Kahn structured the library in three concentric square rings: an outer ring of load-bearing brick holding the exterior walls and reading carrels, a middle ring of reinforced concrete holding the book stacks, and an inner ring forming a dramatic atrium with enormous circular openings revealing several floors of stacks.