After a frenzy of construction, a sparkling remodeled Robert Crown Law Library opens for the fall semester. 

Law School Administrators weren’t talking about religious awakenings last year when they first discussed Dean Kathleen Sullivan’s vision of “bringing students into the light.” They were talking about her idea for an overhaul of the library, designed to follow upon the Law School’s success two years ago in remodeling its 16 classrooms. 

Little did Frank Brucato, Senior Associate Dean for Finance and Chief Financial Officer, know that this summer’s construction would leave him feeling, at times, as if he were facing tribulations of a Biblical sort, be they flooding, a prolonged wander through the desert, or the distracting clamor of bells. The three-month-long project had to overcome a delay in permits, a series of fire alarms (but no fires), and an accidental sprinkler eruption in the Admissions Office that flooded several rooms in the building. 

“If our bad luck continues, we are prepared to bring in Feng Shui experts, dowsers, shamans, and exorcists,” Brucato said in July. By the start of classes in September, however, the only shaman involved in the project had been Brucato himself, who led its successful completion as he had the classroom project. 

“The library is the most important work space for students at any law school,” Sullivan declared September 10 before faculty and students took their first tour. “We already had a great building, a great set of students and professors, and the world’s greatest library staff, but we needed a great reading room.” 

And that’s what the Law School now has. The new Robert Crown Law Library boasts a grand first-floor entrance, redesigned study space, wireless Internet connectivity, and a stylish reading room, complete with plush reading nooks bathed in natural light. Inspired by reading rooms at the New York Public Library, Harvard, and Yale, the renovation creates an inviting central academic space that encourages intellectual exchange and collaboration amid the latest Silicon Valley technology. 

With its warm oak furnishings and sleek metal lighting fixtures, the revamped 16,500-square foot space is a dramatic departure from the original’s once-groovy, now-gruesome, 1970s palette of dingy browns, garish oranges, and lime greens. Where cramped study carrels and overcrowded bookshelves once lined dark, narrow aisles, a meet-and greet lounge area now opens up to rows of custom-built wooden work tables and ergonomic Aeron chairs accommodating up to 120 students in a bright, airy hall. The library’s 500,000 books remain, but a mobile-shelving system in the basement now houses rarely accessed volumes to make more room for scholarly pursuits upstairs. 

The first floor received the brunt of the jackhammering. Construction workers blasted a new main entrance through a concrete wall, replacing the second-floor entrance and opening the ground level to a flood of outdoor light. They raised the ceiling two feet to give the new reading room an airier feel, and installed seven conference rooms, two with large plasma computer display screens, to encourage study groups. The third floor received a fresh coat of paint and new carpeting. 

“Our mission was to relocate books and provide more access for interaction and study,” explains architect Steven Kelley of the firm Miller/Kelley, which had redesigned the School’s classrooms. “The Dean wanted to bring the students into the light,” he says.