The Library at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH, has won the Twenty-Five Year award from the American Institute of Architects. The award is bestowed annually on an American work of architecture that has proved its merit over a life of at least a quarter of a century. … The Exeter Library, which opened in 1971, was designed by Louis I. Kahn (1901–74). Kahn … accomplished something no one else had quite figured out how to do. He made modern buildings that achieved the timeless, monumental presence of the great works of the past. … Kahn respected books. ‘Nobody ever paid the price of a book; they pay only for the printing,’ he once said. Exeter is his attempt to embody, in brick and teak and marble and concrete, the essence of a particular kind of institution: the house of books, the library.