The exterior of Suzzallo Library functions as a curriculum in stone. Terra cotta sculptures by Allen Clark depict eighteen figures chosen by the faculty to represent the breadth of human thought: Moses and Plato, Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri, Newton and Darwin, Beethoven and Leonardo da Vinci, Gutenberg and Galileo, among others. The front facade carries stone coats of arms from universities around the world, including Oxford, Paris, Bologna, Harvard, Yale, Heidelberg, Uppsala, and Salamanca. Above the main entrance, three cast stone figures represent "Thought," "Inspiration," and "Mastery." The cumulative effect is less decorative than argumentative. The building insists, through its ornamentation, that this place belongs to a tradition stretching back centuries and spanning continents. Whether you enter as a freshman or a visiting scholar, the doorway frames you against several millennia of intellectual achievement.

The Graduate Reading Room spans the entire third floor of the library's west front. It is the space that justifies Suzzallo's cathedral comparison and the reason the building appears on lists of the most beautiful college campuses in America. The room's proportions are ecclesiastical: the soaring ceiling, the tall narrow windows, the length that makes the far wall dissolve into shadow on an overcast afternoon. Oriel windows at each end of the room display painted world globes bearing the names of European explorers. The windows filter Pacific Northwest light through stained glass, casting patterns across long wooden tables where students have studied since 1926. During a renovation at the turn of the millennium, the 2001 Nisqually earthquake struck, but because sixty percent of the interior seismic reinforcement was already complete, the library sustained only minor damage. The room survived, as cathedrals tend to.

The Allen wing, added later, hosts an installation whose Lushootseed title translates as "Raven Brings Light to this House of Stories." Commissioned by the Washington State Arts Commission, the project weaves Coast Salish artistic traditions into the library's fabric. Sculpted ravens and crows populate the lobby. Ron Hilbert Coy carved the Table of Knowledge from cedar. Mare Blocker printed and bound the International Symposium of Light. Poems by J.T. Stewart line the walls as broadsides, and two cawpets by Carl Chew serve as study desks on the first and third floors. The installation does something the original architects did not: it acknowledges that the land beneath this cathedral of learning belongs to a tradition far older than Oxford or Bologna, one that has its own stories, its own forms of knowledge, and its own ways of passing them forward.

Suzzallo and its connected Allen Library house approximately 1.6 million of the University of Washington Libraries' six million volumes. The Special Collections hold a Rare Book Collection with volumes printed before 1801. The Microforms and Newspapers collection is the largest of its kind in any Association of Research Libraries member institution. Beyond the stacks, the library serves as headquarters for the UW Libraries' technical services, including the Monographic Services Division and the Serials Services Division. The building has also seeped into popular culture: it appears as a recurring setting in the 2018 virtual reality game Moss, developed by Polyarc, a studio founded by University of Washington graduates who apparently could not leave the reading room behind even in a fantasy world. For the students who pass through it daily, the library is both a working tool and a daily reminder that learning is meant to feel like something sacred.