NEW HAVEN, Conn. » "Few works can equal it as a monument of lifelessness and decadence; none can surpass it in extravagance and falsity."

Writing in an undergraduate review called The Harkness Hoot in 1930, William Harlan Hale had nothing good to say about the new Sterling Memorial Library, "built at a cost of about $7 million by Yale University, and safely constructed – alas! – for the ages."

Why, he wondered, did Yale insist on a "Girder Gothic" faux cathedral while great minds elsewhere were fashioning a new age of minimalist, transparent, unsentimental architecture?

Time has answered his question.

"To me, it conveys a sense of belonging to this scholarly world," said Marina Filiba, a Yale senior from Buenos Aires who majors in architecture. "I think it was a good bet to push ahead with this style, regardless of the time they conceived it in."

Rather than being reviled as movie-set medieval and too overtly Christian in design, Sterling Memorial Library is now such an important symbol of the university that in 2011 Yale was given $20 million by Richard Gilder, a New York money manager, philanthropist and alumnus from the class of 1954, to restore, clean, modernize and reimagine the entrance hall, known as the nave.

The work, completed this fall, revealed just how spectacular Sterling must have looked when it opened. Stained-glass and ceiling vaults, colors and contrasts, coffers and carvings and gilding that had all but disappeared under 80 years of pollutants and grime have jumped back to life.

Its function has changed, too.

"We wanted the nave to be a destination," said Susan Gibbons, the university librarian, "and before, what it was was a passageway."

The most significant transformation occurred in the south aisle, once home to the card catalog. It is now a popular study lounge, carpeted and filled with wingback chairs, camelback couches, end tables and computer work stations.

"This is the first year I ever got a message from a friend saying, ‘Hey, let’s go meet up and study together at Sterling,’" Filiba said.

Card drawers, though empty, have been retained along two walls, creating a sense of continuity – at least for anyone who can remember what purpose they once served. Some cabinetry was reused to disguise access panels in the columns for the library’s new air-conditioning system.

"The biggest challenge was the air conditioning," said David Helpern, the founder of Helpern Architects, which designed the renovation, working with the Turner Construction Co.

Unlike the steel-framed tower for the book stacks, Helpern said, the walls of the nave are pure masonry – stone on stone – with few hollow spaces through which to thread new ductwork and equipment.

As the library was being planned in the 1920s, Yale discontinued compulsory chapel attendance. With that decision, all hope faded for an enormous new chapel on campus. Yet the library’s designer, James Gamble Rogers, "strongly resisted the idea that religion would have no architectural representation at Yale’s center," Dr. Margaret M. Grubiak of Villanova University wrote in a 2009 scholarly paper, "Reassessing Yale’s Cathedral Orgy."

What Rogers created at Sterling, Grubiak said, was a "new kind of sacred space for the modern American university – a cathedral library laden with quasi-religious iconography," including a mural by Eugene Francis Savage at the far end of the nave that depicts a figure in "Alma Mater" that might as well be the Virgin Mary, "or at least a saint," Grubiak said.

The circulation desk below the mural was the altar. There were even confessionals. (They served as telephone booths.)

Young Hale took offense at these liturgical overtones, but – for good or ill – they are largely lost on contemporary students, Gibbons said.

Sometimes, she said, visitors from abroad "would genuflect because they thought in fact this was a cathedral." For students, however, the library is a "cathedral of knowledge and that metaphor seems to resonate quite well with them," she said.

"I really don’t see in the students any kind of confusion or sense that by entering this space, they’ve entered a religious space," Gibbons said. "I think they’re just as rowdy here as they’d be anywhere else."

David W. Dunlap, New York Times

© 2014 The New York Times Company