How Exeter Was Built and Evolved Over Time

Exeter has two architectures worth attention: an intact New England town and one modern masterpiece.

The Kahn library

Louis Kahn’s library for Phillips Exeter Academy, completed in 1972, is organised as three concentric zones. The outer ring is load-bearing brick carrying the reading carrels, each with its own window and a wooden shutter so a reader can control the light. Inside it, a concrete structure holds the book stacks in permanent shade, because Kahn held that books should be kept away from daylight and readers brought toward it. At the centre a hall rises the full height of the building, with four enormous circular openings cut through the concrete walls so that the stacks are visible from the floor, lit from a clerestory and crossed by concrete beams. The brick outside is entirely unornamented and the arches widen as they descend, expressing the increasing load. Kahn considered it among his best buildings.

The town

Federal and Greek Revival clapboard houses with fanlights and pilastered doorways, brick commercial blocks on Water Street from the nineteenth century, a white Congregational church, and the bandstand of 1916 at the crossroads.

The Ladd-Gilman House

A brick-clad timber house of around 1721, extended over the eighteenth century, which served as the state treasury.

The academy campus

Around the Kahn library the school has buildings of almost every American period — Federal brick, Colonial Revival, Georgian — laid out around quadrangles and lawns, which is why the modern library reads as such a deliberate break. Kahn matched the brick and refused everything else about the surrounding idiom.

Mills

Brick mill buildings at the falls, several converted.