Metro Pulse/Feature/Langston Hughes Library

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How globally-renowned architect Maya Lin transformed a local barn into the Langston Hughes Library

by Christine Kreyling

A curious structure rests on the grounds of the 3-D architectural archive known as the Museum of Appalachia in Norris. The two-story building looks a bit like a stocky woman shrouded under a large umbrella, so broadly does the second story overhang the first. The cantilever barn—so-called because the horizontal beams of the upper level extend a full 12 feet beyond the vertical supports of the two animal pens beneath—speaks the architectural vernacular of East Tennessee. It's a plain language of weathered boards and rough logs and minimal geometries.

Down the road toward Clinton lies a former barn with a similar profile, but this smaller building is no museum piece. Its time-silvered siding and gleaming metal roof now shelter books and magazines rather than livestock. This barn-turned-library is designer Maya Lin's attempt to teach an old dog new architectural tricks. In the process, Lin forges an unlikely alliance between white and black America.

The barn's unusual form first compelled Lin to consider using it for the library she'd been asked to design for the Children's Defense Fund retreat and conference center. "I'd never seen a shape like that before and wanted to save it," she says. Marian Wright Edelman, the CDF's director, had thought of various ways to use the building, "but she was not really looking at it for the library. Once I realized that the book collection was small, and that the library would really be used as an intimate gathering space, I came up with the concept of an elevated reading room," Lin says. "It was underutilized space and fit with the domestic scale of the site."

In sliding a brand-new library into a 19th century architectural tradition, Lin has turned the design stereotype of a Shaker chest in a modernist living space inside out. Here it's the envelope that's an artifact of folk functionalism and the interior that's the self-conscious expression of a complementary lean ethos.

Lin worked with Margaret Butler of Martella Associates, the Knoxville firm that served as architect-of-record (Lin has an architectural degree from Yale but is not licensed to sign off on blueprints), to deconstruct and reconstruct the exterior around a new steel skeleton. "The loading requirements for a library mean you need lots of steel," Lin explains.

"We reused the logs of the two cribs," Butler says, "but not much was salvageable of the upstairs. So we used historic weathered siding from another barn." The new standing-seam metal roof is also historically appropriate. According to the definitive study of East Tennessee cantilever barns by Marian Moffett and Lawrence Wodehouse, the owners of these barns typically replaced the original wood shingle roofs, which rotted in the rainy climate, with metal ones.

But there are external clues that what lies within is strictly contemporary. Large skylights shed a constantly shifting pattern of rays over the reading room and staircase. Broad panes of glass asymmetrically placed on the gable end of the upstairs open up ample sightlines to the nearby pond. Most dramatic is the lining of translucent glass within the ground level cribs that now contain a tiny gift-and-book shop on one side and stairs and elevator on the other. In Butler's words, the glass between the unchinked logs "glows like a Chinese lantern" at nightfall.

Inside the tiny, 30-by-60-foot structure, Lin has carefully crafted a pleasant if unremarkable interior featuring honey maple floors and particle board panels for walls and ceiling. Lin also designed the library's furnishings, utilizing budget materials such as a soybean-based particle board for the table tops that reads as blue granite.

"I wanted to make a real cut between outside and inside," Lin says. "There didn't seem to be much point in preserving the rustic feel of the barn's interior" because the new use was to be so different from the old. "But with only 2,000 square feet of space, we had to be clever. We rotated the barn 180 degrees on its site, to allow us to use the larger pen for the vertical motion corridor and the smaller one for the shop, because we needed every square foot," she explains.

If what you see of the design is by Lin, it was Butler and the engineers on the team who were faced with the difficult task of making the building actually work to contemporary standards of climate control and handicapped accessibility.

"In a building that's essentially on stilts," Butler explains, "there's no place to put the mechanical systems at grade level. You have to hide them upstairs." Turning challenge to advantage is a "geothermal loop" that utilizes the water temperature of the adjacent pond for heating and cooling by means of a pump system. "It's a very enviro-friendly, sustainable form of development," Butler says.

The library was named to honor Langston Hughes, the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, and is located on what was once the farm of another African American writer, the novelist Alex Haley. The farm attracted the author of Roots in part for its proximity to his friend John Rice Irwin, the founder of the Museum of Appalachia. (The barn itself was moved to the farm, though neither the CDF staff nor Irwin know when.)

In 1994, the Children's Defense Fund bought the 157-acre site from the writer's estate for the establishment of its retreat. Each year, according to CDF literature, 2,500 adults and teens gather in the main lodge and guest cottages to teach and learn how to become advocates for the nation's poorest and most at-risk children. The eight-foot chain link fence that surrounds the CDF retreat itself strikes a defensive posture, suggesting that the kids are literally stockaded against a hostile world.

The library was dedicated in the spring of 1999 during a symposium on race, children, and poverty attended by a host of day-tripping celebs—Hillary Rodham Clinton and Martha Stewart, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou. Lin herself was wafted into town on the private jet of Leonard Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble and a director of the CDF, who, with his wife Louise, donated the $700,000 for the barn's conversion. In line with the CDF's self-stated mission of "connecting our children with their heritage to awaken and rekindle our spirits and build the next generation of leadership," the library houses 4,000 volumes of African American literature and history.

Butler says she's heard that it was Haley who first thought of turning the barn into his own library, but that the writer died before he could act on his impulse. And in explaining the resonance of the Haley farm for the CDF and its Black Community Crusade for Children, a brochure notes the parallels between Haley's career and the CDF's goal to make "people aware of a great heritage that had been denied them by the history books and the corrosive legacy of slavery." But Lin's gesture of architectural salvage is a more complex act of cultural appropriation than this statement would indicate.

In their exhaustive survey of the remaining examples of the cantilever barn, Moffett and Wodehouse discovered that the barn's physical form was an innovative response by usually illiterate 19th century whites to the conditions of self-sufficient farming in isolated settlements of East Tennessee. The vast majority of the approximately 300 surviving examples of the form are restricted to two counties: Blount and Sevier. The authors explain that the cantilever barn was a mixed-use structure appropriate to the subsistence farming that provided for all the needs of the family on site rather than the raising of a cash crop that could be sold to buy the necessities.

From interviews with the descendants of the barns' builders, Moffett and Wodehouse learned that the purpose of the barn's broad cantilever was to shield animals in the ground-level pens—horses and mules in one, cattle in the other—from the abundant rain and hot sun typical of the region. The mildness of the climate rendered chinking of the logs unnecessary. The width of the overhang allowed for the dry storage of farm implements around the pens. The floors of the pens could be hard-packed earth because the barns were sited on a rise for drainage. The builders employed flat stones set on the corners as the only foundations necessary for leveling the site for horizontal logs. The open breezeway between the pens provided good air circulation, and prevented dampness from building up in the loft, where hay, cornstalk fodder, and seeds were stored.

Because Moffett and Wodehouse could find no record of written instructions for building barns of this type—and no clear-cut precedents in the building traditions of Europe or other areas of North America—they theorize that the cantilever barn is the product of a local oral tradition. The building tradition lasted well into the 20th century because the illiteracy and the isolation did, too.

What the Langston Hughes Library represents, therefore, is the transformation of an architectural custom of a small pocket of white rural America into a vessel for the preservation and celebration of the national heritage of black America. That the creator of this transformation, Maya Lin, is herself Asian American adds another stream to the cultural melting pot.

Lin first demonstrated this ability to weld complex social issues into art—and simultaneously revealed her dual educational background as architect and sculptor—in her Vietnam Veterans Memorial of 1982. With the Langston Hughes Library Lin again proves that walls can talk, and in a multitude of languages.