Tools of Industry: Designing the Stained Glass of the Sterling Law Building Reading Room

TOOLS OF INDUSTRY: 
DESIGNING THE STAINED GLASS OF THE STERLING LAW BUILDING READING ROOM
An exhibition at the Lillian Goldman Law Library,
Yale Law School,
New Haven, Connecticut

By 1931, as the Yale Law School moved from Hendrie Hall to its new premises within the Sterling Law Building, the Bulletin could describe the Library and its collections as "an important laboratory for graduate students." Then, as now, the windows of that new library were ornamented with a series of stained glass windows, designed by New York City's Henderson Brothers and titled "Tools of Industry." The typewriter; the "modern printing press"; the radio tower; the "moving picture machine": these and other imaginings of modernity survive as ornaments within a library that has continued over nine subsequent decades in its work of supporting the active life of the Yale Law Library.

Tools of Industry highlights the original drawings for the Sterling Law Building reading room.  Manufactured by Henderson Brothers, for a building designed by John Gamble Rogers, the drawings capture a vision of the library and its relationship to modernity from a particular moment in the American twentieth century.

Tools of Industry will be on view in the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Lower Level Two, outside the Rare Book Room, from January 22 - February 25, 2024.