The Folsom Library is a beautiful library on the campus of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. It was constructed in 1976 in the brutalist style. I'm not going to spend much time reiterating the buildings interesting history; the wikipedia article I linked has plenty of that and the website has more. However, I do encourage you to look into it—it involves a legend about the library falling down a large hill and all of the floors bowing inward.
The library looms like a heaped pile of cubes, with overhangs and balconies all over. The bottom layer has several walkways that pass underneath the higher floors, giving the impression of tunnels.
Despite the impression of tumbling chaos, the entire building is symmetrical, and there is a sense of underlying order. There is a tension there, between a form that is hard to wrap your brain around easily and its sense of greater plan at work.
The library has another layer of tension: despite its highly structured and "unnatural" appearance, the entire thing is covered in a wood grain texture.
The works used unfinished planks to construct each of the forms that were used to cast the raw concrete (beton brut) that the building was made from. These planks transferred over their texture, leaving the surface of the building with a deeply set grain.
There is a reason all of my pictures of the Folsom Library are from relatively close—the library is built extremely close to another building, which I have my back to in the picture of the front door above. The Alan Voorhees Computing Center is pressed practically up against the Folsom Library, and before it was a Computing Center it was RPI's old library.
Before that, however, it was a chapel.
This final layer of tension completes the delicious contradiction that you feel when you're walking around this corner of Troy, NY. THe brutalist library is pressed right up against a gothic chapel with stained glass windows, which is also a computer science building.
You'll notice that none of these picture show the two buildings together. Despite their proximity, it is very difficult to get them in a shot together. In fact, it is very difficult to even see both of the buildings in your field of vision at the same time. Each structure is too close to the other to get a good picture of the front of either, and the place where they are closest is completely surrounded by large obscuring trees. The closest I got is the view of the back corner of the library with the road above, the trees on the right are obscuring the chapel. You pretty much have to turn completely around to look at one, and then at the other.
Maybe if you came there in winter (which I did not have the opportunity to do) it would be more obvious, but as it is you get an odd feeling while you're there that even though these buildings are directly adjacent, there is some kind of separation between them.
If you are ever in the Albany area, there are a lot of really cool buildings around. Most people say Empire Plaza is worth visiting for the architecture, and it definitely is (go see The Egg!), but you should take the chance and drive the 20 minutes out of town to Troy and go walk around the Folsom Library. There is visitor parking very close by, and you can get to the area between the library and computing center without any stairs, so it should be quite accessible.
Updated 2026/10/4
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