Its uniform lighting, comfortable chairs and easy access to the stacks were commended in review after review, article after article.

"Lamont Library is as modernistic as colored television," The Crimson opined on the library's opening day.

"The light in [the student's] cubicle (he discovers) is exactly the same in intensity as the light in every square foot he has covered since he entered the building," wrote a Harvard Alumni Bulletin reporter.

In his speech at the library's opening ceremony, President James B. Conant '14 extolled Lamont's virtues: "The conventional red tape of library bureaucracy has disappeared. The undergraduate in quest of knowledge or inspiration, whether he is self-propelled or motivated by dread of approaching examinations or papers to be written, can go directly to the shelves."

One undergraduate quoted in the Jan. 15, 1949, Harvard Alumni Bulletin said Lamont's atmosphere beat that of Widener with flying colors, calling the Widener reading room "a disturbed vastness about as conducive to study as the waiting room in Grand Central Station."

An alumni bulletin writer said, "[The undergraduate] doesn't walk into Gothic emptiness or Georgian hall. He walks straight into a bright world of books. He can lay hands on one almost before the door has closed behind him."

But its modern design, juxtaposed with the ivy-covered Wigglesworth and replacing the historic Dana-Palmer House, which was moved across the street, garnered much criticism and did not end up sparking a transformation of campus architecture, as many feared.

"It had more effect on other undergraduate libraries built in other places," Cole says.

Nevertheless, the negative feedback did come-hard and fast.

In a letter to the editor of the Boston Herald, John C. Poland of Brookline compared the new library to a "cheese factory," lamenting the library's departure from the prior "hasty but just return to the former and better architecture" demonstrated by the recently built colonial-style Yard dorms.

Another Herald letter to the editor proclaimed Lamont "the most hideous college building of its type in America." This writer also compared the library to a cheese factory, then modified his statement, writing, "It is worse than that, more like a garage or livery stable."

Shelf Life

Lamont began as a duplicate library, meaning its holdings were also available in less "open" settings. It remains so to this day, according to Cole.

The original catalog of 30,000 books was chosen by Edwin E. Williams, the first assistant librarian of Lamont, to provide undergraduates easy access to the books they were likely to need most often.

Williams assembled the list from course reading lists, lists of books in several other University reading rooms, the "Shaw List of Books for College Libraries" and book reviews in 200 publications from the previous two decades.