Hunt at 10 — The First Decade of the Hunt Library

By Gracie White, Business Administration, ‘25

Over twelve years ago, in the spring of 2012, as librarians, architects, planners, designers, and information technologists were gathering at the University of Calgary for the inaugural Designing Libraries for the 21st Century Conference, the James B. Hunt Jr. Library—one of the major inspirations for the launch of the conference—was being readied for its April 3, 2013 dedication.

As the Hunt Library prepares to host the eleventh iteration of Designing Libraries (DLXI)—its fourth time hosting the conference—it seems fitting to reflect on the impact this iconic building has had on the NC State community as well as its influence on design trends in libraries and higher education.

During her 1987 interview for the Libraries Director position, the late Susan K. Nutter, when asked about her plans for the future of the Libraries, outlined a vision for building a creative “nexus” for the then-emerging Centennial Campus community of students, faculty, researchers, and corporate and governmental partners. That vision would eventually become a reality.

“The vision for the Hunt Library was to create a ‘beautiful and inspiring’ building that would offer a rich and exciting set of spaces, services, collections, and technologies for faculty, students, and scholars,” recalls Carolyn Argentati, the Donald E. Moreland Deputy Director of Libraries. “It would also welcome the broader community through programs, events, and collaborative partnerships. The library would fuel the university’s spirit of innovation with iconic architecture and inspiring spaces, democratizing access to emerging technologies and sparking creativity, collaboration, and entrepreneurship.”

In order to bring this vision to life, the Libraries partnered with NC State’s College of Design to evaluate proposals from various local, national, and international architectural firms. This process included a charette session in which six finalists tackled a design problem, proposed solutions, and provided a window into their creative and collaborative approaches—a session overseen by then Dean of the College of Design, the late Marvin Malecha.

Then a student, now a Lead Designer with the firm LS3P, Michael Wagner emphasizes how “instrumental Dean Malecha was in getting students involved in the charette process, which was an incredibly valuable learning opportunity for us, as students—but also an opportunity for the various firms who were competing for the work to get a unique lens and perspective into the client and the university that they never would have had otherwise.”

Ultimately, the firm that emerged from this selection process was the Norwegian firm Snøhetta—the very firm that Wagner was assigned to for the charette. As the winner of the Mies van der Rohe Prize for Contemporary Architecture and the European Award for Urban Public Space, Snøhetta had won international acclaim for such projects as the Library of Alexandria, the Oslo Opera House, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum Pavilion, and the redesign of New York City’s Times Square.

“The selection process itself was unique,” notes Snøhetta’s Managing Director Elaine Molinar. “The weekend design charette, while nerve-wracking, was a clever way for the university to assess what kind of working relationship they would have with the team they chose. We learned from them just how much of an impact a library can and should have on an individual, a university, and the state of North Carolina as a whole. Marvin Malecha and Susan Nutter readily tossed out conventional modes of thinking and embraced taking risks to achieve their goals. We felt very fortunate to be working with such a talented client team of inspiring and fearless visionaries.”

Together, the NC State team and the designers created what was universally acknowledged as “the library of the future” and a signature building for the university, the state, and the region. The James B. Hunt Jr. Library’s bold design was a visual statement of its bold purpose—to be a place not of the past but of the future, a place that welcomes all members of the NC State community to learn, experiment, collaborate, and create. Upon opening, the Hunt Library was immediately recognized with some of the most prestigious awards for libraries and architecture—the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Educational Facility Design award, the AIA/American Library Association (ALA) Library Buildings Award, and the Stanford Prize for Innovation in Research Libraries among many others.

Senior Vice Provost and Director of Libraries Greg Raschke was another core member of the Hunt Library planning team: “It’s interesting to say ‘the best learning and collaboration space in the country’ since there’s no trophy for that, but we wanted to build something that would be a signature for NC State in the 21st century, and I think it’s safe to say that we ended up with one of the best academic library centers in the world.”

Another key member of the NC State team, the Libraries’ Associate Director for Learning Spaces and Capital Management, Patrick Deaton, points out two crucial design decisions Snøhetta made early on that led to the Hunt Library’s architectural success: “1) the final site selection—to one side of the Engineering Oval instead of on its centerline—and 2) the decision to use an Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) for the bulk of the print collection, to create more open space in the building for study and collaboration.” Deaton adds that “the Snøhetta team was interested in using a weaving motif throughout Hunt Library, as a reference back to the textiles heritage of North Carolina and NC State. This occurs at the programmatic level, where different functions such as classrooms, library spaces, and offices for other departments are arranged adjacent to one another. On the exterior of the building, the weaving motif is expressed in the dynamic composition of glass, metal panels, and vertical fins.”

The result, according to Shann Rushing, Principal at Clark Nexsen—the project’s executive architects (formerly Pearce Brinkley Cease + Lee)—is “an iconic building for NC State that in many ways initiated the current trends that dominate modern academic libraries: access to cutting-edge technologies, support for collaborative learning and research, open and engaging floor plans, and access to a variety of study and collaboration spaces. It intentionally stands in stark contrast to the existing buildings on campus that are clad primarily in red brick masonry with punched windows.” Rushing, whose firm designed the adjacent Fitts-Woolard Hall, acknowledges the Hunt Library’s influence: “One of the design concepts of Fitts-Woolard is to be an ‘architectural bridge’ between the Hunt Library and the other academic buildings on Centennial Campus. This was achieved by combining certain design aspects of the Hunt Library, such as vertical solar fins, metal panels, and dynamic façade composition with design aspects of the adjacent buildings such as red brick masonry and punched windows.”

Molinar echoes Deaton and Rushing when describing Snøhetta’s approach to designing the interior spaces of the Hunt Library: “This library was conceived of as the ‘living room’ of Centennial Campus. Putting most of the collections in an automated storage and retrieval system located within the building allowed for more real estate to be devoted to people. We were able to design a diversity of individual and collaborative work models to address the multiple and new ways of teaching, working, and learning.”

One thing that makes a living room a living room is its furniture and décor, and the Hunt Library is as famous for those elements as for its exterior, having won ALA’s Library Interior Design Award, in addition to its architecture awards. Gwen Emery, NC State’s Director of Libraries Environments, remembers Nutter, when going through furniture samples and upholstery swatches, saying, “‘Look at these colors, look at these colors,’ so I started just bringing in colors.” Eventually Emery curated nearly 200,000 sq. ft. of the most colorful and iconic modern furniture from the 20th and 21st centuries, pieces like the Barcelona Chair, the Eames Lounge Chair, and the Ball Chair. To help tell the story of the Hunt Library’s interior design philosophy, Emery created CHAIRHUNT, a book that is both a scavenger hunt and a catalog for visitors, inviting them to explore the Hunt Library’s interior in a fun, interactive way. With more than 80 different types of chairs, each piece is an example of how the Libraries wanted to inspire—through design—creativity, collaboration, and innovation.

Another thing that defines a living room is its technology—a TV, maybe even a nice sound system. For the Hunt Library, this takes the form of large-scale display walls, immersive visualization spaces, and digital media creation spaces. A key realization in the planning process, according to Argentati, “was that the visualization, display, and exploration of data was a research and teaching imperative that no single department or program on campus could support on its own. Since libraries have traditionally supplied the shared tools that foster learning and research, it made sense for the Hunt Library to be a catalyst for these activities by featuring advanced visualization spaces. Digital media creation, another strength of the Libraries’ service portfolio, was also a significant element of the building program.”

But, for all its world-class design and its emerging technology, the Hunt Library would just be a building without the expertise of the people who activate it—in order for it to fulfill its promises to the NC State community, a world-class staff is required to facilitate student and faculty work in those spaces, with those resources and technologies, and through those services.

Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director Emerita at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), points out that “Susan realized early on in the planning that in order for her vision to be successful on implementation, a staff must be in place that could choose and implement technologies and then work with faculty and students to incorporate them into their work.” Lippincott and Tom Hickerson, who led the Taylor Family Digital Library project while Vice Provost of the University of Calgary, are the co-founders of the Designing Libraries conference and know well that for as long as it takes to dream up, propose, design, and build a signature building, it takes just as long to build a staff capable of providing the services that bring it to life. “Susan spent years before Hunt opened putting highly trained staff into place and providing space in the Hill Library for them to test out technologies and hone their skills,” Lippincott adds.

NC State’s Chancellor Randy Woodson couldn’t agree more: “When you go inside and you realize how librarians brought vision and design to the way a library could function [...] it was just so different than what I had experienced as a student or what I experienced even as an administrator at another world-class institution.” One thing Woodson is quick to point out, however, is that, while the Hunt Library is the more famous building, the Hill Library now offers a lot of the same important spaces and services. ”When you approach the Hill Library from the outside, you’re not exactly inspired by the [exterior] design, but it also provides these resources to faculty [...] data sciences is a great example of how the Libraries and its librarians help them think about how to be more effective in their scholarship and research.”

The Libraries team certainly had this in mind when developing Hunt—how they might incorporate these spaces, technologies, and services into Hill. As a result of a 2020 renovation of that library, Hill and Hunt now mirror each other with their inspiring, colorful interior design, their music studios, and their gaming, data, and immersive visualization spaces.

Woodson adds that without these spaces and the staff to activate them, “you can’t create an environment where people are prepared to help you think through how you are going to structure data or how you are going to create success in your program going forward. That’s a huge recruitment tool for faculty, and they can see that when they go into Hill or Hunt.”

Faculty have certainly embraced the platform that the Hunt Library provides. With the help of an expert Libraries staff, researchers, instructors, and students have breathed life into the building and made it their own. Whether it’s immersive visualization opportunities for class projects, novel research presentations in the long-running Coffee and Viz event series, or digital exhibits on the large-scale display walls, the NC State community leverages the Hunt Library’s offerings on a day-to-day basis.

On rarer occasions, faculty and students have been able to activate the entire building to showcase their research. From visiting scholar David Silver’s Black Mountain Farm ‘happenings’ to the Experiencing King and Virtual MLK events of Vicky Gallagher and Jason Miller, to several iterations of State of the Sciences (featuring musicians and dancers), the NC Literary Festival, and countless national and international conferences, the Hunt Library becomes a building-wide, multimedia canvas for researchers, instructors, and students to present their work to the world.

And the world has taken notice. The Hunt Library has significantly raised NC State’s international profile. “One of the great things for the university is what this place has done for its reputation. People still come from all over the world to see what we’ve done,” Woodson remarks. “Just last week we hosted the National Academy of Innovators, a whole new crop of people that had never been to NC State, and they came away like, ‘Wow…we don’t have this back home!’”

Woodson also points out that the Hunt Library hasn’t rested on its laurels. “Hunt continues to evolve. That space,” Woodson notes, pointing to the former Creativity Studio, “used to host a US Navy Maritime Skills Simulator.” It has since transformed into the NC State Gaming and Esports Lab, already having partnered with Epic Games, EA Sports, and the Manchester City Football Club; and the former Game Lab has become The Landing, a wellness space for NC State students. As data needs grew on campus, part of one learning commons became the Dataspace, which is outfitted with specialized hardware and software and staffed by Data Science Consultants, providing access to the tools and expertise needed to develop and use critical data science skills. The Hunt Library and its staff have proven that, while the building is special, it is by no means precious, and it can adapt to the rapidly changing needs of its users.

Raschke has a clear vision for the future of the Library of the Future. He would like “to create an Experiential Learning Center with a large maker space; a classroom style, entrepreneurship garage; and larger digital media studios.” His goal is to “help drive interest in NC State, provide a centerpiece of hands-on activity, inspire K-12 visitors, and frame the Libraries as a hub of experiential learning.” The Experiential Learning Center Raschke foresees would make the Hunt Library a central, highly visible place where students and faculty could develop practical skills, explore entrepreneurial interests, connect meaningfully with peers and community partners, and discover less-visible university resources and programs.

As the Hunt Library continues to evolve, it provides inspiration for NC State as its entire campus also continues to evolve. “Every architect I’ve ever known talks about how design can bring life to an organization. And I think Hunt for me was the first example on our campus,” Woodson reflects. As NC State gets ready to host DLXI, attendees from around the world will get to see Main Campus’ new signature building—the Integrative Sciences Building (ISB), recently named Woodson Hall—continue to take shape. The Chancellor points to the Hunt Library as the model for the ISB: “Every time we talk about the ISB, we say it will do for the Brickyard and Main Campus what the Hunt Library did for Centennial Campus. I think with Hunt we broke through the utilitarian mindset and realized design can be both inspirational and functional.”