Mount Angel Abbey Library

Name: Mount Angel Abbey Library
Address: One Abbey Drive
City: Mt Angel
Year of Construction: 1970
Architect: Alvar Aalto
Original Use: Library
Status: Built / In Use
National Register of Historic Places : Not Listed
Description:

Mount Angel Abbey is a Roman Catholic seminary located on top of a hill in the city of Mt. Angel, Oregon. The construction of the existing buildings started in the late 1920s to replace the former monastery destroyed by a fire in 1926. In the 1960s, the expansion of the Abbey continued with the introduction of hospitality facilities and a new home for the library’s collection that survived the fire.

It was under the leadership of Father Barnabas Reasoner that the collection was rebuilt and modern library procedures were introduced. He was also the person who selected the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto to design the new Abbey library. By this time, Aalto was a well-known Modernist architect and designer in the United States. In the early 1940s, he was a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he designed Baker House, a residence hall. In 1964, he designed the Kaufmann Conference Room for the Institute of International Education in New York.

“…We need you. We have a magnificent monastic site. We don’t want to spoil it…Give us a building that will fill our needs in a beautiful and intelligent way.” –Letter to Alvar Aalto from the monks of Mount Angel Abbey

Upon receiving a letter from the Benedictine monks of Mount Angel Abbey, Alvar Aalto agreed to design the library at Mount Angel Abbey. He started work on the building layout at his studio in Helsinki with the support of American designer Erik Vartiainen, who had worked for him in Finland, and DeMars and Wells, the architecture firm from California in charge of the executive project.

After visiting the site prior to construction in 1967, he decided to move the location of the library 10 feet to save two Douglas firs. The final result was a fan shaped layout for a three-story building. The structure consists of a concrete frame supported by concrete foundations, enclosed by brick walls in pale yellow color to blend with the Abbey’s medieval atmosphere. Only the top floor is visible from the campus. The other two floors descend the hill into which the building fits.

The façade is unpretentious yet presents Aalto’s trademarks: the use of natural wood for latticework; simple, clean lines; and brick cladding. In the interior, white curving walls are flooded with controlled daylight from a main curved skylight and small skylights above the entrance. Furnishings, lamps, and movable objects were also designed by Aalto and exported from Finland. The 43,000 square feet library is now home to one of the most important theological libraries in the Pacific Northwest. It would be the third and last work of Alvar Aalto in this country.

REFERENCES

“Aalto’s Second American Building: An Abbey Library for a Hillside in Oregon.” Architectural Record, May 1971,111-16. Accessed September 16, 2020. https://www.architecturalrecord.com/ext/resources/archives/backissues/1971-05.pdf?41918400.

Huxtable, Ada L. “Finnish Master Fashions Library for Abbey in Oregon.” The New York Times Archives, May 30, 1970. Accessed September 16, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/30/archives/finnish-master-fashions-library-for-abbey-in-oregon-aalto-blends.html.

Mount Angel Abbey. Mount Angel Library. Accessed September 14, 2020. https://www.mountangelabbey.org/library/#aalto.

Simcoe, Jonathan. “Alvar Aalto’s Pacific Northwest Gem.” Dwell. Last modified October 18, 2016. Accessed September 16, 2020. https://www.dwell.com/article/alvar-aaltos-pacific-northwest-gem-3739cc3d.