If you think of buildings as having personalities, the University of Vermont's Billings Library would be quiet, gnomic, reserved and slightly mysterious. Its ornate brownstone form hunkers down modestly between other more extroverted brick buildings on UVM's College Row, facing west, across the long UVM green.
Right next to Billings is Ira Allen Chapel, with its bright white columnar front and tall, cheery, brick-and-white colonial revival tower, which helpfully offers clock faces showing the time of day. Billings' much smaller towers are ornate and darkly Romantic, almost odd. The slightly taller north tower sports elongated, arched windows opening into a belfry, and wears a pointed, shingled hat. Its tiny south tower seems a squat medieval lump, radiating mystery. The building extends outward from its front arched and gabled pavilion, a tapestry of complicated windows and dark stonework.
It looks the way you'd think a college library should look. It was designed by one of the leading American architects of the Victorian era, Henry Hobson Richardson and is a prime example of the style that came to be known as Richardsonian Romanesque.
At its dedication in 1885, Prof. N.G. Clark described the building as "an oration in stone," and that seems about right. It is one of the most important buildings in Vermont, both historically and architecturally.
The building has long been a favorite haunt of UVM students. Its interior is as complex and elaborate - and as pleasantly dusky - as its stony exterior, and offers various niches for quiet study or uninterrupted dozing.
However, Billings has a long history of not quite fitting in. First as a library and then as a student center, the building was deemed inadequate. In 1961, UVM's libraries were moved to the much larger Bailey-Howe library building, a marble-fronted modernist cube that offers plenty of space but little soul. That building fits in perfectly with the rest of UVM's East Campus, which has become a hodgepodge of undistinguished lumpen-modernist buildings with no sense of coherency or design.
But for Billings, there is hope. UVM's new administration has decided to return the building to something close to its original use: a quiet retreat for research and study.
The University's superb Special Collections division will move into the building, as will the Center for Research on Vermont, and the Leonard and Carolyn Miller Center for Holocaust Studies. (Because of the pioneering work in holocaust studies by the late Prof. Raul Hilberg, UVM is a leader in this field of scholarship.)
This is all very good news, perhaps especially for Vermont studies. Both Special Collections and The Center for Research on Vermont have long needed more adequate quarters.
And now, in this very special - if slightly mysterious - old building, they have it at last.
