A new $32.3 million dollar Des Moines Central Public Library opened in April, 2006. Designed by British architect David Chipperfield, who had also recently designed a new cemetery for Venice, Italy, the building has been praised as a significant work of architecture. The snapshot to the right shows the exterior of the building. All of the library's external walls are of copper colored glass.
This new library has attracted a stream of librarians interested in (someday) bringing new library facilities to their own communities. Our (former) library director visited the facility soon after it opened, as did several other people from around the system, including our current library director. I made a very quick tour of the building myself in October, 2006. Unlike the Des Moines librarians, and unlike many of our own staff, I did not like what I saw.
As I ran through the building I kept thinking "we would kill for this...(fill in the blank)"
... for this space.
... for the computer lab.
... for the reference area.
... for the cafe.
... for the underground parking.
Yet, as attractive as these amenities are, they cannot compensate for flaws that result from the architect's excessive devotion to his design concept. The architect is a declared and vocal minimalist. The design concept for the library is one of undivided public space, there are no separate rooms, no nooks or architecturally separate spaces in the main public areas. The external walls, being entirely of a specially constructed glass, are intended to extend the effect of undivided space, and do so in different ways at different times of day, varying according to the natural and artifical light around the structure.
To the eye alone, this library is in many respects a beautiful building, but its interior spaces still seem uncomfortable. The architect celebrates his design as being more "socially and architecturally open" more "accessible" than more traditional designs. It seems to me that the openness that has been achieved here is a lot like the commercial openness of a big box retailer. This library will serve individuals as customers pretty well, but it is not community space in any sense: The absence of attractively laid out, small scaled, functionally diverse spaces throughout the library will mean that it will not be a very good place to find spontaneous conversations, hold small meetings, or organize group activities. The availability of study rooms, and a separate wing with meeting rooms (No design concept can be completely realized!) do not alter this conclusion.
I want to illustrate the building's faults with specific examples. We will begin with the youth services area. Coming down the north stairs, one of the two major stairwells in the building, you approach the rear of the "Childrens Library." That is what it says on the left edge of the green wall ahead of you. Let's ponder the snapshot I took as I came down the stairs. What is wrong with this picture?
To begin with, the stairs are a dark place. They are lined with black polished stone, black marble perhaps. I should have been able to tell what kind of stone that was; I have a degree in geology. Alas, although I had a magnifying glass in my pocket, it was too dark to tell. Dark staircases are a mistake in any public building, but are particularly bad design in an urban library, whose diverse clientele will inevitably include the mentally ill and the not infrequently incarcerated.
The green wall you face here is the wall of a small central kiosk that contains the children's restrooms and materials storage for the youth librarians. To the left of the wall, you see the ends of the shelving in the childrens area. All the openings here are blocked off by soft plastic barriers that have been laced to the shelves. The reason that these ad hoc barriers have been added is obvious, they block off a dark, lounge like area which is not in the direct line of sight of any of the youth librarians. The barriers are an open acknowledgement that the space is badly designed.
The barriers themselves are no doubt temporary, but the children's librarians are not well situated to maintain good casual supervision of the area. If, on exiting the stairs you turn right and continue some twenty or thirty feet, you come to the spot where I made this snapshot of the children's librarians at work. There are two of them in the picture, though you can probably see only one. Neither faces the collection, which is in the distance behind them. Consider the contrast with the youth services areas at our own two newer branches, where even a single staff member working at the desk can see anyone who enters the area. That same staff member can see about 75% of the youth services collection from where she or he sits and will notice if someone looks like they need assistance. The service desk seen here would not be badly placed if it were guarding the entrance to a corporate work area, but it is very poorly placed for public service to patrons actually using the children's collection.
This childrens area does not have a space or room devoted to childrens programming. There is a "story and craft room" at the other end of the wing. It is tucked into an area walled off and otherwise designated as workroom space. The design drawing in the Des Moines Register (Special Supplement, April 6, 2006) describes the room as "quaint," a very, very strange word to use in this ultramodern design context. It is the wrong word, too--the right word would be "cramped." Story Time audiences at our central library need twice the space on most occasions and sometimes more than that.
It's obvious that the architect's design concept could not allow for the need for an activities room in the children's area. Instead an inadequate and distant space was chosen because this need--the need, essentially, for space enclosed by walls--had to be hidden from view if the abstract conception of undivided public space were to appear to prevail.
Let's leave the childrens area behind, although in parting I would add that I did not like the flooring, the ceiling, the lighting or the color of the paint on the walls. The shelving, on the other hand, was nice and can be ordered from a catalogue.
The snapshot to the right here offers a view of a much used area, with video rentals, music CDs and PACs in the foreground, and the fiction collection in more distant stacks. In this view, facing back toward the main entrance from the childrens area on the ground floor, the impact of the architect's design concept seems fairly benign. The rough concrete ceiling and the minimal utilitarian lighting give the space the feel of a converted warehouse. Chipperfield wrote that he felt that "the old idea of a library as a sort of temple had to be challenged a bit." The warehouse look has been a popular way of "challenging" more complex ideas about space and functional needs since the 1960s. It is, quite literally, the cheap way out.
The warehouse look saves money on non-essentials. The choice in this design has been been to save on interior finish and spend more for sheer space and for the building's (very expensive) glass cladding. That is not actually a bad trade-off for the architect and his client to have made. In this case, however, the trade-off has resulted in a building that has dark reaches on a dark day, especially on the second floor where the ceiling is lower. With lower ceilings, there is less indirect lighting. The fixtures seem to be a bit closer together on the second floor, but dark areas are still noticeably darker than on the first floor.
The Special Collections area, on second floor, is hidden behind the stacks. The doorway to the area is, in fact, directly behind a shelf end on the narrow passageway next to the wall. The space is so narrow that it was impossible to take a decent picture of the door. The snapshot at right shows a Special Collections display case, seen through the stacks. The display case has glass on both sides, so you can see into the Special Collections area, which is a long, hall shaped space along one side of the building. The space narrows toward the south. There are shelves and limited workspace in the area, but no room for small gatherings or lectures.
The absence of group or activity space in this area may be a disadvantage for this collection. The Special Collections area holds a collection of Iowa authors, and just outside is a large Iowa collection that seems to focus on the kinds of publications that businesses need. Both these collections could be the focus of activities, gatherings or lectures that could help develop constituencies to support them, if space was available. Activities centered on a collection can help people in the community develop a sense of ownership. That opens the door not just to financial support, but to greater awareness of the resources and more extensive use of them by the community.
There is meeting space in the library, but it is sterile space. There are small conference rooms and study rooms on the north wall of the public areas of the library. There is a separate wing on the ground floor with a large auditorium (210 sitting, 500 standing) that can be divided into three smaller spaces. This is adjacent to the cafe. That wing, by the way, has its own entrances, so users don't even have to enter the library or walk past library displays to use the facilities.
It is entirely possible to walk casually through the new Des Moines Main Library and find it an attractive place. Everything is new. The reference area and computer labs are well laid out and generously sized. Some of the reading areas have very attractive outdoor views. The architect is a technical wizard who has achieved what he set out to achieve: The green roof is covered with vegetation that cuts cooling and heating costs. Views into and out of the building can be spectacular, especially in the evening. Yet the design as a whole is a painful failure. Its problems are sometimes glaring--those are problems I have paid some attention to here--and sometimes subtle. I mentioned the architect's stint as a cemetary designer at the beginning of this review partly out of frustration with that subtlety. This very expensive building is a corpse, deader than rational argument can convey in a few words.
It is, in fact, a modernist corpse in a post-modern world. The black, stone-clad spartan stairwells, the service desks, and the specially designed oversize furniture in lounge areas all have a rich, corporate look. Corporations operate in private, not public space. They like their buildings to protect their space and to suggest an aura of efficiency, solidity and control which may be a fiction, but is appropriate to their ends. Inappropriately transposed into a public building whose purpose is to accomodate and serve a complex community, these design elements, together with the warehouse like openness and sense of exposure, work against the public purpose. Libraries are not just warehouses for books. They do revolve around books, and around our common cultural history, but they serve the community best by supporting, through their materials and technology, diverse community needs for association, sociability and connection. This building will not serve such purposes well.
