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Playing with Duplos: Preparation for a Successful Architectural Project

Sarah Thomas

An opportunity to serve as a library consultant to Gund Partners, an architectural firm, is taking me to Emory University five times this fall.  Emory’s Oxford College, a small campus for students in their first two years of college, is renovating and expanding its dated 1960s library into a library and information technology center (LITC).  Although I’m consulting on private time, there’s plenty to learn that is of benefit to Cornell.  Gund employs a very user-centered interactive process to solicit input on design and function.  On my recent trip to Georgia, I facilitated one of three small groups of faculty, administrators, and staff who were given a three-dimensional model of the existing library and two adjacent historic buildings that need to be factored into new construction.  To plan and experience the mass of the LITC, the architects provided participants with a pile of Duplos (toddlers’ large snap-on blocks), telling them that each large block represented 1,200 square feet.  The challenge was to build a 60,000-square-foot facility without overwhelming the neighboring chapel and Grecian-style buildings and to consider the relationship of the building to the campus oval at its front and the forest at its rear.  This exercise filled the dual role of conveying valuable information to the architects about how the stakeholders perceived the planned building and of making the Oxford library planners more concretely aware of the difficulty in aligning their imagination with the reality of the size of the building and how it would fit into their campus.

duplo

A subsequent workshop challenged stakeholders to locate various elements they wanted incorporated into the building in the outline of the building mass that they had created earlier.  With paper images of atriums, information commons workstations, a reference desk, study tables, and other features of the LITC, three mini-design teams struggled to balance the practical functions of the library with the aspirations of the various stakeholders.  Again we learned that it is not so easy as we had imagined to create the alignments among the various functions and units.  Almost every function wanted highly visible space on the entrance floor, except for the IT staff, who wanted to be as far away from the public as possible.  Among the program elements that were important to all groups was the porosity of the building, allowing people outside to see the activity inside, and those inside to be connected to the campus oval and the forest beyond.  Participants also wanted to be sure that people entering the building would see books immediately, as the universal symbol for a library. 

Later in the day, a third exercise tested our prioritization skills.  Each element, such as an atrium, a fireplace, a “green” or environmentally friendly roof, compact shelving, emeritus faculty offices, information commons, and so on, received a price tag.  We then attempted to prioritize the features we wanted within the allowable budget.  Having learned that one result of hurricane devastation is a sharp rise (1% per month in 2005; 5% in 2006) in construction costs, we considered the great danger that the original budget would not cover all that the client had envisioned, and we built in a 10% cut.  In my group that meant that we dropped back from the “gold” LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standard to “silver,” saving 5% of the cost of the building by doing so.  Three additional meetings will develop the ideas explored in the workshops into a final presentation by the architect in mid-December.

On the horizon for Cornell are renovations in both Olin and Uris libraries, as well as the potential incorporation of the Fine Arts Library into the planned Milstein building.  Although we have devoted many hours to working with architects and holding focus groups of faculty, students, and staff, it might be desirable to update our concepts and engage users in our planning.  In particular, we need to refresh our thinking about Olin, where discussions about its renovation are now a few years old.  This interactive process might be both educational and informative as we move closer to the beginning of our renovation, which, according to the university’s capital plan, is scheduled to begin next year.

Next: Janus Conference on Research Library Collections