The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society

The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society was founded in 1869 and is one of the oldest genealogical libraries in the country. Its headquarters was opened in 1929 to designs of the firm of La Farge, Warren and Clark on East 58th Street just off Park Avenue. The five story building contains a double height classical library on the top floor where intersecting barrel vaults are topped with a central oculus. Book stacks occupy the center of the library with reading areas at either end.

The genealogical library occupies the attic story of the building and is defined on the exterior by a balustrade and cornice which separate it from the lower levels of the building. These are defined with a three story high giant order of pilasters which in turn sits on a high stone base containing the entry and its loggia within.

A large hall occupies the ground floor, with administrative offices on the 1st and 2nd floors and exhibit spaces on the 3rd floor. The genealogical library was therefore a quite separate space crowning the structure and supported by the other administration and public spaces of the building. The library had outgrown its space however, and more importantly, digital media had radically changed the nature of genealogical research, requiring online access to computerized databases.

A complete reprogramming of the building was undertaken in response to these changes, in which the administrative spaces were reorganized and renovated and the library was expanded down into the third floor, where a digital research library was created. In expanding the library downwards, the deliberate separation of the original library from the rest of the structure was broken and a connecting spiral staircase was carried down into the building like a root.

The stair is located directly under the oculus and is of the same diameter, establishing a shaft of space from the base of the building, and its implied connection to the street, up into the sky. This shaft was developed as a symbolic connection between the past, as represented by the genealogical records of the library, and the public and its future, as represented by the oculus and the sky.

The stair was defined with a double helix geometry in which the staircase acts as one helix inside the shaft and the perimeter of the shaft is articulated with the opposing helix. This double helix is famously the structure of the molecular model constructed in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson of the genetic material DNA, which in 1958 Crick showed to determine the sequence of amino acids in a polypeptide through a triplet code. This discovery gave a scientific basis to the study of heredity and has deepened genealogy from its original meaning as a study resulting from the knowledge of ancestral pedigrees to one concerning genetic information of the human race in general.

The conscious separation of the original library in a privileged and detached space above the street was a representation of its earlier meaning as a genealogical library: but the connection of the original space down into the base of the building through the genetic staircase (and thus symbolically to the public at large) is an architectural transformation representative of the changed meaning of heredity in modern life.