page_title: Low Memorial Library
section_title: Architecture
hierarchical_section_title: Low Memorial Library / Architecture
caption_attribution_description: Columbia University, New York
context_page_description: The Low Memorial Library is located on the Columbia University campus in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, New York City. It was built in 1895 by University President Seth Low as the University's central library. Financed with $1 million of Low's own money due to a lack of funds from alumni, he named it in memory of his father, Abiel Abbot Low. It has housed the central administrative offices of the university following the completion of the Butler Library in 1934, and is the focal point and most prominent building on the university's Morningside Heights campus.
  The steps leading to the library's columned facade are a popular meeting place for Columbia students as well as home to Daniel Chester French's sculpture, Alma Mater, a university symbol. Low Library was officially named a New York City landmark in 1967, with the interior being designated in 1981, then a National Historic Landmark twenty years later.
context_section_description: Low Library was designed by Charles Follen McKim of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, which was responsible for the design of much of Columbia's Morningside Heights campus. The library was designed in the neo-classical style, incorporating many of the elements of Rome's Pantheon.  The building is in the shape of a Greek cross and features windows modeled on those of the Baths of Diocletian. The columns on the library's front facade are in the Ionic order, suited to institutions of arts and letters. An inscription on the building's attic describes the history of the university. It reads:
  King's College Founded in the Province of New York 
  By Royal Charter in the Reign of George II
  Perpetuated as Columbia College by the People of the State of New York
  When they became Free and Independent - Maintained and Cherished from Generation to Generation
  For the Advancement of the Public Good and the Glory of Almighty God
  The interior abounds with classical references. At the entryway are bronze busts of Zeus and Apollo. The foyer contains a white marble bust of Pallas Athena, modeled after the Minerve du Collier at the Louvre and donated by Jonathan Ackerman Coles of the Columbia College Class of 1864, an alumnus of Columbia's Philolexian Society. She is surrounded by the twelve signs of the zodiac. The 106-foot-tall (32 m) rotunda, formerly the library reading room when the building was used for its original function, is lined with columns of solid green Connemara marble from Ireland, topped with gold capitals. Roman and Greek philosophers Demosthenes, Euripides, Sophocles, and Augustus Caesar stare down from the rotunda's heights as the four points of knowledge, Law, Philosophy, Medicine, and Theology, mark the four points of the Greek Cross. The rest of the interior is finished with Italian and Istrian marble.
  A late 19th-century real estate magazine, believing Low to be patterned after a French church by "the architect Rumpf", criticised the design, writing that "there is scarcely any original designing done in this city, except the vagaries of the incompetent. The rest is mostly a copybook reproduction of classical and other detail. Successful architects have too much to do to be pre-eminently artists -- they must be first-rate men of business."
caption: Low Library elevation, from the upper stories of Butler Library.
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