Candler Library’s Matheson Reading Room may be brand new, but it feels like a place of venerable, scholarly dignity–which is just as its designers intended.

Footfalls echo and voices carry in the capacious reading room, encouraging those using it to speak in whispers if they must speak at all. “We wanted it to be a loud, boomy place, so that people would be quiet,” says Nancy Bayly, facilities planning coordinator for Emory College and a member of the Candler renovation planning team. “It’s a reading room, not a conversation room.”

It is a conversation piece, however. Restored to its original two-story height, the reading room once again serves as the centerpiece of Candler Library, with all its old grandeur on proud display. Dark, gleaming wood tables unencumbered by computer wiring, heavy chairs, hand-crafted book and periodical shelving, graceful hanging chandeliers, and a noble row of arched windows recall the room’s former state, when for some thirty years it was the heart of academic life on campus.

Built in 1926, Candler Library was a gift of Asa Griggs Candler and the University’s first library building on the Atlanta campus. Upon its dedication, the library was hailed as one of the South’s finest in both beauty and utility.

“With its exterior of Georgia marble, scoured and polished until it gleams, the new structure nestles within the enclosing pines like a scintillating gem spreading over the quadrangle rays of reflected beauty,” read a poetic editorial in the Emory Alumnus magazine. “The library holds a commanding position on campus–a location quite in keeping with the central importance of the library in a university system.”

At the center of the library’s third floor was a two-story lobby that housed circulation services (left). Ringing the four walls of the lobby, halfway between the floor and the skylights, was a plaster frieze, a replica of Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen’s depiction of “The Triumphal Entry of Alexander into Babylon.” The original frieze had been commissioned in 1811 for a visit by Napoleon to Rome, and the twenty-one-panel Candler copy was purchased from Boston plaster artists Caproni and Brother for $323.

When the library opened, a columnist for the Emory Wheel wrote breathlessly about the frieze, calling Candler on the whole “a most magnificent structure.”

By the 1950s, however, Emory had far outgrown its gem. To make space for burgeoning library collections and various academic needs, the reading room was halved horizontally, effectively doubling the floor space but ruining the aesthetic of the room. The 1957 renovation, the brainchild of then-Director of Libraries Guy Lyle, was the subject of controversy, but Lyle saw no alternative and weathered the storm.

At that time the frieze was removed, panel by panel, and boxed up like so many Christmas decorations with no next year in sight. Some forty years layer it was rediscovered in the library’s attic, dusty and water-stained, and fixed up with the help of Friends of the Emory University Libraries. Alexander and his entourage were then installed in Woodruff Library for a time, but when the Candler renovation was completed it was agreed the frieze should return to its first home.

Planners of the Candler renovation called their project “Reclaiming the Grandeur,” and spent months studying photos and documents about Candler, as well as visiting other libraries with old-style reading rooms, to develop their vision. The building was almost totally gutted during the two-year, $17-million renovation, an ironic necessity in the process of making it more like its former self. Whenever possible, the designers paid homage to the original structure: marble discovered on the floors of the stacks was recycled as stairs, bathroom counters, and tabletops; the wall directory uses a font from the 1926 University yearbook; experts painstakingly restored the detailed plaster work in the reading room; glass windows over the doorways echo the original transom design; and the striking color scheme, with hues of pale green, warm yellow, and soft blue, recalls that of the first Candler Library.

More modern changes include a ten-thousand-square-foot addition on the north side of the building. An enclosed bridge links Candler Library’s third floor with Woodruff Library, allowing for easy transit between the two, although the more impressive entrance to Candler is from the Quadrangle. Heavy brass doors open to the old, massive double staircase, which ascends on either side of the lobby to the Matheson Reading Room.

“The Candler Library renovation is the final phase and culmination of a fifteen-year effort to enhance and expand the library facilities,” says Charles Forrest, capital projects manager for the libraries and a leader on the planning team. “We have built a lot of space for the user community with computers, and we have always wanted to offer a variety of spaces for people depending on what they need to do on a particular day. With this project we were really attempting to develop a more traditional kind of library space and restore the historic character of the reading room. We heard from everybody: ‘Give us back that classic reading room, to round out the library experience.’”

While the reading room and lobby were focal points of the project, the library also incorporates offices, classrooms, and seminar rooms. Most of the College administrative offices, including those of Dean Robert A. Paul and Senior Associate Dean Rosemary M. Magee, are now housed in Candler, high on the fourth floor, with windows onto the reading room below. The offices of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, women’s studies, Jewish studies, African American studies, and classics also have moved in.

“I think it turned out even nicer than we could have expected,” Bayly says. “After working so long, looking at blueprints and floor plans, it’s wonderful to see the reality of all that hard work. What makes it so beautiful is its finishes, the way we were really able to bring it back to its historic look.”

Despite her enthusiasm, Bayly has to whisper her admiration for Candler Library. It’s mid-morning and light is streaming in through the two-story windows of the Matheson Reading Room while at least a dozen students sit quietly at the long tables, poring over their books in this grand, contemplative, and silent space.–P.P.P.