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Libraries that Wow and Welcome

With added amenities and electronic offerings, libraries are re-establishing themselves as community centers — and even attracting tourists.

By Larry Flynn, Senior Editor

August 1, 2004

Building Design and Construction

Fewer libraries were constructed last year than in any year since 1985. But while the total number, 226 — 195 public and 31 academic — was down, a number of prominent and astoundingly eye-catching libraries appeared on the scene.

The Seattle Public Library's Central Library, Salt Lake City Public Library, and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library in San Jose, Calif., emphasize design in ways that wow, welcome, and attract patrons, while at the same time providing comfortable, entertaining, and easy-to-use spaces in which to access books and a proliferation of electronic information.

These libraries are trendsetters, but they are not alone in reflecting many of the new developments taking place in libraries large and small.

Given the sizable budget of each of these libraries, the funding crunch affecting most systems throughout the country does not directly apply in these instances. But while construction of the $165.5 million Seattle Public Library was under way, funding shortfalls throughout the system in 2002 forced a week-long shutdown of the city's existing libraries, according to Library Journal. As is often the case when budgets are tight on a project, Building Teams make funding constraints work in favor of the project by raising their level of ingenuity and innovation.

Partnering to leverage services

As has been the case with K-12 schools recently, partnered facilities, which leverage costs and the building space for multiple uses, are now becoming typical elements of library construction. At the Courtland (Calif.) Community Library, the town's library is commingled with a school. The Oconto (Neb.) Public Library includes a community hall and senior center that were destroyed by a tornado in 2000. Bell Memorial Public Library, Mentone, Ind., incorporates daycare and a senior center. The Evergreen District Branch of the Wichita (Kan.) Public Library houses a Head Start facility. The Seattle Public Library's Capital Hill Branch features a neighborhood service center.

Parks and recreation areas also are being co-joined with libraries. The Stafford Library in Woodbury, N.M., coexists with an indoor park, while South Valleys Library in Reno, Nev., is located in a county park. In Ohio, the Northwest Branch of the Akron-Summit County Public Library includes a community center, a walking track, and athletic fields.

Budgets, though large for high-profile projects like Seattle's Central Library and the $92 million Salt Lake City library, still had to be adhered to, say Building Team members. While the funding for San Jose's $177.5 million King Library was ample for the huge 475,000-sf facility, the Building Team was "given a very clear directive that we weren't going to be given any more money for the project," says Dolores Montenegro, senior program manager for the San Jose Redevelopment Agency, which led the project.

One of the many “wow” experiences found in Seattle’s Central Library affords a bird’seye view of the “Living Room” grand atrium. The diamond-patterned steel skeleton provides lateral bracing. Wider steel flanges are used in areas where additional support is needed.

The King Library, whose design team included San Diego's Carrier Johnson in a collaborative effort with library expert and modernist elder Gunnar Birkerts of Gunnar Birkerts Architects Inc., Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and local firm Anderson Brulé Architects, is the result of a unique "town and gown" partnership agreement between the city and San Jose State University, whose 25,000-student campus is located downtown. The idea for the partnership was percolated over morning coffee between the mayor and the president of the university. "Neither the city nor the university had the resources to build a new library on their own," says Montenegro, so the partnership was an ideal match.

The eight-story project comprises the city's new public library and SJSU's new main campus academic and research library. James Klingensmith, project manager for Providence, R.I.-based construction manager Gilbane, credits the project's success to the establishment of operational, contractual, and accounting protocols between the city and SJSU, which "created a strong overall program and operating methodology" and a streamlined decision-making process. Final decisions ultimately rested with the redevelopment agency and Montenegro, who says the Building Team "had a set plan to put in motion, which made my job as project manager extremely easy."

The project's extensive planning process gave Building Team members a "deeper understanding of the project," says Klingensmith. In so doing, "the team members were able to make better decisions in the field. It wasn't just a cold set of documents."

According to Art Heinrich, SJSU's campus architect, the public and academic sections of the library share the reference collection and circulation desk, and both the public and students have access to the entire library. But the "natural flow of the building" dictated that the more active public sections of the library be located on the first four floors, with the academic and research sections located on the top four floors.

The library is located on land owned by the university on which a library previously stood. The city, which leases its space, contributed $101 million toward the project, while SJSU contributed $76 million.

Event places and public forums

The idea of the library as a venue in which to foster a sense of community and as a "cultural meeting place" rather than a place to simply go pick up a book or do research is also important, says Isaac Franco, AIA, project manager with Moshe Safdie and Associates, Somerville, Mass., which designed the 237,000-sf Salt Lake City Public Library, in association with local firm Valentiner Crane Brunjes Onyon. "Salt Lake City needed a cultural place where people could go and spend time," Franco says.

Seattle's Central Library, designed by Rem Koolhaas's Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture with local firm LMN Architects, has its awe-inspiring diamond-shaped glass-and-steel-enveloped "Living Room" atrium, which rises eight levels overhead. Salt Lake City has its "Urban Room," a light-drenched indoor urban gallery, featuring a stone-paved walkway that runs 200 feet between the main section of the library and the far end of the warped, sloping steel and precast concrete "Crescent Wall," which ties together the "Main Street" entrance to the outdoor piazza.

The main public entrance lobby of San Jose's King Library was intentionally designed as a large-scale unprogrammed space, which is well suited to hold a variety of revenue-generating functions for the city and SJSU. On the fifth floor, a roof deck is used for functions. "It's the idea of the library as more of a multipurpose space — a space for events," says Kevin Krumdieck, senior associate with Carrier Johnson.

"These are places to go and sit and meet people," says Franco, noting that the Salt Lake City library's forum spaces are available to the public even when the library is closed. "This is a trend in the role of the library as a public forum for the exchange of ideas and for public culture," he says. "Libraries are more open than museums or concert halls, where you have to have a ticket or a reason to be there."

Shop 'til you drop, eat 'til you pop

Retail shops and cafés are giving patrons all the more reason to spend time at their libraries.

Such amenities are a major component of the Salt Lake City library's lower level. Outside on the plaza, Franco says space is provided for the addition of two movie theaters. A bookstore and a café anchor the ends of the King Library's main street ground floor. On the main (third) level of the Seattle Central Library, a compact 300-sf gift shop features shelving units on tracks, which retract and fit tightly together when the store is closed. Adjacent to the gift store is a small coffee shop — this is Seattle, let's not forget.

Public libraries are breaking the long-standing tradition of banning food and drink from being taken into the stacks, with the Seattle Central Library even promoting the policy — as long as the drink is covered with a top.

Publicly accessible rooftop gardens and decks play a major role in these new libraries. The Salt Lake roof garden is located on top of a triangular-shaped building, which houses the main book stacks, and is accessed via the Crescent Wall by a series of slopes, stairs, and a bridge. The roof supports a mixture of natural grasses planted in several inches of growing medium and trees planted in 3- or 4-foot-wide trenches. The trees are planted over columns to support the additional weight on the roof. The fifth-floor roof deck at the King Library is accompanied by the library's special collections, which are kept on display during events.

However, a vegetated roof planned for the Seattle Central Library was value engineered out of the project in its latter stages, says Sam Miller, principal and project manager for LMN Architects.

Shedding light on 'wow' spaces

Introduction of natural light into libraries through the use of skylights and expansive glass curtain wall is a major theme of the Seattle, Salt Lake, and San Jose libraries. According San Jose State's Heinrich, what looks to be a new trend actually harkens to architect Louis Kahn, whose catch phrase was "Bring the book to the light." "The idea was to store the books in the shade so that they aren't damaged," says Heinrich.

At the King Library, the eighth-floor reading room is arranged in linear fashion along a 30-foot floor-to-ceiling curtain wall, which affords a panoramic view of the city. The team chose spectrally selective low-e glazing that reduces glare and heat gain, yet remains highly transparent. The use of ceramic frits on the glazing provides unobtrusive shading.

Using daylight as a wayfinding measure, the King Library's design team carved out the center spine of the H-shaped building, forming a vertical "Light Canyon" atrium that allows patrons to see up through all eight floors. The daylight also draws the eye to the main circulation desk and vertical circulation. The redevelopment agency's Montenegro calls this treatment "visually stunning."

Moshe Safdie and VCBO used glass extensively to marry the Salt Lake City library's existing outdoor plaza with its new interior space. Its "Urban Room" is flooded with light to bring the outdoors in, making the piazza more active and the library more inviting to patrons, says Safdie's Franco.

The library's glass-encased "Canyon," which occupies the space between book stacks and library offices, allows light in from the top through to the lowest level of the library. A south-facing double-glazed, insulated curtain wall, called the "Lens," provides readers with spectacular views of the Wasatch Mountains. Nicknamed by the team as the "heat modulator," the Lens, whose outer glass layer is low-e, contains openings at the top and bottom, which allow for natural ventilation in the summer. In the winter, the sun heats the air between the glass layers, warming the building.

Salt Lake City Library’s south-facing double-glazed, insulated curtainwall, called the “Lens,” provides readers with spectacular views of the piazza and Wasatch Mountains.

Sheathed in a diamond-patterned net of glass and steel, Seattle's Central Library, whose reflective patterns change the appearance of the exterior as the sun moves across the sky, takes daylighting to the nth degree. To reduce glare and heat gain in areas receiving direct sunlight, OMA and LMN conceived a metal mesh glass cut in 4×7-foot diamond-shaped units, which use aluminum sheet metal that is cut, stretched, and placed between the layers of glass. This is said to be the first use of the metal mesh material in the U.S. A clear, low-e glazing is used on the remainder of the exterior.

The steel skeleton supporting the glazing resists lateral forces, says Jon Magnusson, P.E., chairman and CEO of local structural engineer Magnusson Klemencic Associates.

Wired, but ready for wireless

One of the great challenges in library design is accommodating today's technology needs while providing the flexibility for future advances. When the Seattle, Salt Lake City, and San Jose libraries were being designed in the late '90s "wireless environments were too great a gamble to rely on," says Carrier Johnson's Krumdieck. Books are not going away anytime soon, but access to electronic information is becoming more important to patrons. Public and academic libraries are increasingly taking on the role of teaching patrons how to use computer systems for online catalogs and to conduct research.

Since the Salt Lake City Library opened in February 2003, the library has introduced a wireless network. To accommodate changing technology, the library utilizes a raised-floor system. Although "flexibility" is a favorite word of librarians, Krumdieck says his firm favors designing for "adaptability." "If a library is too flexible, it won't be affordable and it won't get built," he says.

Instead of going with a raised-floor system, the King Library design team devised a system of four mechanical shafts located at the edges of the building, through which electrical and data infrastructure is distributed. Each floor contains three data distribution closets to reduce the distance that the hard wires have to be run. In all, 2,700 reader stations are hardwired in the library. A few wireless networks have been installed since the building opened last August, with more to come, says Krumdieck. "The wireless networks are easy to install, but you still need to have that vertical backbone in place," he says.

Seattle's Central Library is a smorgasbord of technology. Reference librarians use wireless technology to communicate with each other and to answer phone calls, freeing up phone lines. Wi-Fi hotspots located in the Level 5 "Mixing Chamber" reference floor, the Living Room, and other areas of the library enable patrons wireless access.

The Mixing Chamber contains 132 online catalog computers with fiber to all desktops — 400 public computers in all. "The public has access to a lot of online information resources, such as LexisNexus, that they wouldn't ordinarily have," says LMN's Miller. Patrons searching for a book using the online catalog receive a photo of the book and a diagram of the book's location.

Books and other tangible items get in on the high-tech action through an automated handling system, which sorts and places books on carts for shelving. A radio frequency identification system, which uses an antenna to read a microchip placed in an item, automatically checks in the item.

Just as the first Carnegie libraries made library patronage open and free at the dawn of the 20^th century, today's libraries are opening new doors to learning, culture, and ideas through technology and engaging, inviting design.

Acknowledgements
The editors wish to thank our sister publication Library Journal for its assistance with this article.

Project Summaries

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library San Jose, Calif.

Vital statistics

Opened: August 2003

Area: 475,000 sf

Number of floors: 8 floors

Construction cost: $177.5 million

Building Team

Owner: City of San Jose; Redevelopment Agency for the City of San Jose; San Jose State University

Design architects: Carrier Johnson/Gunnar Birkerts

Associate architect: Anderson Brulé Architects

Construction manager: Gilbane

General contractor: Hensel Phelps

Salt Lake City Public Library Salt Lake City, Utah

Vital statistics

Opened: February 2003

Area: 237,000 sf

Number of floors: 5

Construction cost: $92 million

Building Team

Owner: Salt Lake City Library

Design architect: Moshe Safdie and Associates

Architect of record: Valentiner Crane Brunjes Onyon

Project manager: Construction Control Corp.

General contractor: Big D

Seattle Central Library Seattle, Wash.

Vital statistics

Opened: May 2004

Area: 362,987 sf

Number of floors: 5

Construction cost: $165.5 million

Building Team

Owner: Salt Lake City Library

Architects: Office of Metropolitan Architecture/LMN Architects JV

General contractor: Hoffman Construction Co.

Structural engineer: Magnusson Klemencic Associates

Prairie-like meadow makes for natural setting atop Hoosier library

Capitalizing on its site's steeply sloping profile, William Brown, lead architect for locally based Veazy Parrott Durkin & Shoulders, designed an earth-sheltered structure for the Oaklyn Branch Library in Evansville, Ind., which, since its opening in fall 2002, has become a community center. More than 35,000 patrons visit the library each month and book circulation has increased threefold.

In June, the project received a Green Roof Award of Excellence during the Second Annual Green Roof Infrastructure Conference in Portland, Ore.

Publicly accessible, the 17,250-sf green roof, designed by Roofscapes Inc., Philadelphia, as a native "mesic meadow" prairie, is popular with patrons and contributes to the restoration of prairie landscape in southern Indiana. A mesic meadow is characterized by a deep soil profile and perched water table. To emulate this, the roof features an "intensive" 14-inch two-layer system (an 8-inch engineered growth medium and 6-inch drainage medium).

Built at a cost of $17.90 per square foot, not including the cost of the waterproofing membrane, the roof was designed so that it requires minimal maintenance, can be irrigated with minimum evaporation, and conserves energy. Designed to last the lifetime of the building, the roof's granular drainage base layer and upper growth layer are under-girded by hot-air welded waterproofing membranes: a Sarnafil G-476 reinforced 80-mil PVC waterproofing, supplemented by an upper PVC protective membrane.

A strong but lightweight steel and concrete composite roof deck supports the weight of the roof.

Although the library is three times larger than the one it replaced, utility costs are comparable. The thermal lag effects of a super-insulated building envelope, created by the combination of the green roof plus three subterranean walls and high-performance glazing, enhance energy efficiency.

Five new trends in academic and research libraries

Library specialist David Fixler, AIA, a principal with Einhorn Yaffee Prescott, Boston, offers five trends in academic and research libraries:

Sensitive and flexible integration into existing libraries. "The program is going to change, and if you don't plan for it you'll be in trouble."
Staffing crunches. There's pressure all over to reduce staff. "Strategic location of offices relative to services points, entrances, and exits is critical."
Interaction space for staff and students. "You need space for training and education to occur. This is an element that didn't exist in academic libraries until recently."
A growing reliance on remote depositories for books. "It's an issue of retrieval more so than architecture. You need to be able to guarantee that a book will be brought to the library within 24 hours."
Digitization of materials such as tech bulletins and scientific journals. Prerequisite: a healthy budget and time.

Fixler and EYP encountered many of these trends during its recent extensive renovation of the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library at Harvard. With an eye on the long-term preservation of the library's collections, EYP designed a sensitive insertion of new mechanical systems and turned two lightwells into three-story skylit reading, office, and mechanical spaces.

Library market grows despite budget cutbacks

Library construction spending increased for the fifth consecutive year, rising 6% last year, according to an annual report by Library Journal, a sister publication of BD&C. This despite continued budget cutbacks in most states.

Between July 2002 and June 2003, more than $837 million was spent by local, state, and Federal governments on library construction work — a 6% increase from the 2001–2002 level of $788.4 million. Last year, 195 public library projects — including 103 new buildings and 92 additions and renovations — were completed, representing more than 4 million sf of construction put in place.

Despite the uptick in spending, the number of projects completed ties the lowest count in 18 years, and is 17 projects off the 2001–2002 level. Addition/renovation projects represent all of the drop-off.

Funding for the 195 projects came predominantly from local governments, to the tune of $715.4 million, which represented 86% of total funding. The remainder came from charitable contributions/gift funds, which totaled $71 million (8%); state governments, with $34 million (4%); and the Federal government, with $15 million (2%).

Visit www.libraryjournal.com for more on the report.

Library construction spending
(Fiscal year July–June)

	2000	2001	2002	2003
No. of new buildings	114	80	101	103
No. of additions/renovations	127	132	111	92
SF of new buildings	1,752,395	1,924,548	2,144,185	2,340,374
SF of additions/renovations	2,272,684	2,215,702	2,351,100	1,725,902
New construction costs	331,345,167	400,838,076	429,787,571	573,531,535
Additions/renovations costs	301,200,950	285,583,407	358,658,087	263,624,575
Total project cost	632,546,117	686,421,483	788,445,658	837,156,110
Source: Library Journal, a Reed Business Information publication