Suzzallo Library reading room UW
— — a room built to make students lower their voices.
Not only on a wall.
“A Collegiate Gothic hall on the University of Washington quad, two hundred and fifty feet long under a vaulted ceiling fifty-two feet up. Suzzallo's Graduate Reading Room runs the length of the second floor, lit by tall stained-glass windows and rows of bronze lamps on long oak tables. Students call it the Harry Potter room. They almost always whisper. The building opened in 1926, the first phase of a cathedral of learning the university never quite finished. The light shifts all day. From the studio.
Suzzallo Library reading room UW, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Suzzallo Library is the central library of the University of Washington in Seattle, anchoring the east side of Red Square on the central quad. The first phase opened in 1926 and was designed in the Collegiate Gothic style by Carl F. Gould of Bebb and Gould, the same firm responsible for much of the early campus plan. The library is named for Henry Suzzallo, the university president who championed it as a cathedral of learning. The most photographed space inside is the second-floor Graduate Reading Room, which runs the full length of the building's western facade.
The Graduate Reading Room measures roughly 250 feet long by 52 feet wide, with a vaulted ceiling rising about 52 feet to ornate hammer-beam trusses. Eighteen sculpted figures stand outside on the western facade, representing thinkers from Plato to Shakespeare to Darwin, and the interior carries the same iconographic program through carved oak, plaster ribs, and stained-glass roundels. The original design called for a much larger central tower that was never built; what stands is roughly the first phase of a building the university never finished. The bronze reading lamps on the long oak tables are original to 1926.
The Graduate Reading Room is a designated quiet study space and it is the rare library hall where the rule largely enforces itself. Students arrive in waves between classes, walk to the long oak tables under the bronze lamps, and almost always lower their voices the moment they cross the threshold. Phones are silenced; conversations move out into the corridor. The room is open to the public during library hours, and visitors are welcome as long as they hold the same quiet the students keep. The light shifts through the stained glass all day.