OLD LIBRARY BOOKS FOR A WINDOW WINDOWS
Raynal and eleven of his employees removed 356 casement windows throughout the library and refurbished them at Raynal Studios in Natural Bridge, Virginia. Once complete, “They should last another hundred years without any problem,” Raynal says. (Most of the building’s tracery windows were too delicate to remove and had to be restored in place.) There each window was disassembled, pane by individual pane, its hinges and hardware cleaned of eighty-six years of rust and grime, given a special powder coating, re-leaded, re-assembled, buffed and polished, and carefully packed up for shipping back to Durham. Over the last several months, Raynal and eleven of his employees removed all 356 casement windows throughout the library and transported them back to his studio in Natural Bridge, Virginia. But Raynal has more than three decades of experience and an artisan’s appreciation for things that were built to last. It is highly specialized work, the domain of a small group of skilled practitioners. That includes the old-fashioned windows that are so much a part of the “Gothic Wonderland” look of Duke’s West Campus.
One of the major goals of the renovation, as well as one of the major challenges, is to preserve as much as possible of the building’s original character. He was brought in to refurbish the windows as part of the Rubenstein Library renovation project. Raynal specializes in the restoration of historic and stained glass. His firm specializes in the restoration of historic and stained glass. “This building was made in the time of true craftsmen,” says John Raynal. It’s hard to find glass like that outside of Europe these days. It was also of exceptional cost for the time, hand-blown to minimize the presence of bubbles and distortions. The glass is of exceptional clarity, considering its age (circa 1928). Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and another 490 tracery panels designed with varying degrees of ornamental flourish. There are 356 leaded glass casement windows in the David M. Too many and the materials on the shelves will whiten and wither in the sun. Too few windows and a library becomes a gloomy vault. Windows provide the natural light that suffuses a reading room with bookish warmth and radiance, as well as the inspiring views that invite the mind to wander. We are talking, of course, about windows. It has less to do with the size and richness of an institution’s holdings, or the knowledge and expertise of its staff-although these are essential-and more to do with a certain quality of light. Image courtesy of Sergey Furer, Duke Facilities Management.Īmong the things that separate a good library from a truly great one, there is one distinction so subtle we often fail to notice it. To see all of your borrowed titles, click at any time to go to your Loans page.Detail from the original blueprints for the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library (originally called the “General Library”) on Duke’s West Campus, 1928.
OLD LIBRARY BOOKS FOR A WINDOW PDF
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