Let’s Hope Snøhetta’s New Robotic Library At NC State Isn’t Run By An Evil Super Computer

Architizer News

Let’s Hope Snøhetta’s New Robotic Library At NC State Isn’t Run By An Evil Super Computer

January 3, 2013

The Hunt library, designed by Snøhetta, serves as a centerpiece for NC State University’s Centennial Campus, which the school has used for expansions since the 1970s to avoid disturbing the quads of its traditional neo-Georgian brick old campus.

NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, just got a library that’s larger than a football field. The James B. Hunt Jr. Library, which opened yesterday, operates not through traditional open stacks but via a subterranean robot called bookBot, which can deliver any of the library’s 1.5 million books in under five minutes. With executive architect Pearce Brinkley Cease + Lee, Snøhetta worked out a robot-based design that packs in the learning—with a capacity of 2 million books, the building requires just one-ninth of the space to store its volumes than a traditional open-stack arrangement demands. At 221,000 gross square feet, the Hunt library is less a standard-issue academic library than a bot-powered learning stadium. Read more!

The bookBot in February 2012, awaiting its volumes.

Here’s how it works: directed by a supercomputer in the bowels of the building, the bookBot barcodes the volumes, sorts them by size, and stores them in more than 18,000 bins. The first floor of the building features Robot Alley, where visitors can watch the bookBot through a glass wall as it speeds through huge storage aisles to retrieve books, journals, and other materials. With all that space freed up by the bookBot—around 30,000 volumes still live in plain view—Snøhetta set about filling the place with screens, from touchscreen kiosks and browsable visualizations of books by subject matter to the full-on virtual environments students can create in the Teaching and Visualization Lab. The program also includes nearly 100 study rooms, two learning commons, auditoriums, and the Makerspace, which is outfitted with 3D printers, a 3D scanner, and a laser cutter.

The building’s expansive sweeps of glass offer views of neighboring forests and Lake Raleigh.

The university points out that high-density automated shelving systems like the bot—which is really four robots—has long had widespread use in industries like auto manufacturing and textile production, but now could have far-reaching implications for how we set up the research libraries of the future. If more universities follow suit, they just might reach the capabilities and scale of an Amazon warehouse.