December Days #27: How To Adapt To A Space Not Designed For You

[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]

Libraries think about space a lot. It is an unfortunate consequence of being a tax-funded institution that most libraries do not have the space they need to function properly, much less actually be able to let their collections and their workshops breathe and expand to a comfortable place. There is a constant battle between competing interests about how to best arrange the space for maximum enjoyment and occupancy. Libraries with fixed and rooted shelves have even less flexibility in their arrangements. Which is not to say that it isn't possible to rearrange, just that remodels are costly and therefore rare. Often, the remodel accompanies a major repair or system upgrade, as it is much easier to justify putting it all in new places when you're going to have to move it all anyway.

Based on my experience of working in libraries, I have advice for architects and students about designing our spaces.

1. Design for a space that is too small to accomplish its ends. You may not be able to change the square footage of the space, but understand that you are designing for a space where every cubic foot of volume is precious. If you do not have experience in successful design for tiny houses or very small apartments, study those before drafting, because you are going to have to find a way of making this tiny place seem spacious and spread out.


2. Acoustics matter. Each person in the library is going to be both generating and receiving sound, and people are much more likely to complain about receiving sound. Therefore, if your floor plan places any likely loud section (children, teen, meeting room, maker space) directly next to a quiet space (reading space, computer lab (in theory)) without an intervening partition or effective method or redirecting or canceling that loud, you are setting up the library to receive fairly constant complaint about the noise coming from over there. If you set it next to the teen area, as my location is, that's additional complaints about how teenagers are flexing their newfound linguistic power to be able to curse and utter boisterous boasts without their parents or teachers around. One of the libraries I worked for opened a building that was essentially an airplane hangar of space, but crucially, the space where the story times and the game programs and all the loud stuff happened was in one end, could be closed, and had several buffers of tall shelves to stop the noise from getting to the quiet areas further back. It was cavernous, but the acoustics were well-managed. And please, do test your acoustic solutions. It can look nice, but if it doesn't work, go back to the drawing board until it does.


3. Design a building that will still function in thirty years, assuming there will be at least five things you could not have anticipated happening in that time. As a tax-funded institution, the opportunities that a library system will have to build a new building are few and far between. Bond issues and capital funding are generally go to the voter things, and voters are...finicky, even when they like you a lot. Many of the buildings that the public library has were built by Carnegie philanthropy, and there have been emergency repairs since then, but that's it. Since then, there have been a lot of media format changes, program ideas, and computers and the Internet, all of which have to be crammed into a building that was originally designed to house books and a select few people to read them and use them for scholarship. We make do, but it would have been a lot nicer for all of us if we didn't have to fight the design of the building to make it work. Design a reconfigurable space for us and we will enjoy it.


4. Design for giants as well as smallings. This is one of the trickiest parts of getting a good design, but if you nail it, you will have done great work for all of us. It's not just the children's area, though, that has to be designed so that grownups don't destroy their backs and knees and the children can get to the materials - help desk spaces should be adjustable to child-size, preferably without forcing the librarian to have to sit on the floor to do it. And in theory, even the stuff on the top shelf should be accessible to children, either by raising them or lowering the shelf, or by only having shelves that the children can reach the top of. And that adults can reach the bottom of without hurting themselves. But also remember there isn't enough space to do it the way you want to, so you're going to have to innovate.

And then there's just, well, being tall and a children's librarian, which means understanding a lot of being big in a space designed for smaller people.

There's also the part where my current workspace was a kludge, because the building was designed for three stations on the assumption that a children's librarian would be out front most of the day, because there would be a children's desk. There isn't, so there isn't, so there needed to be a new space for me, which was put together mostly out of the spare space in the middle. It helps keep me from expanding by not giving me space to clutter, but it's definitely not one of the designed workspaces. It's much like going to locations that have enough space for their staff, and then having a visitor librarian makes it harder for everyone to have a station that needs it. But we adapt. We almost always manage to. Sometimes to things we shouldn't have to.

Library school often makes overtures at the idea that your community isn't going to have everything you want, but it didn't talk all that much about how the community around you is heavily going to influence your vision of what is possible, and that includes the building space that you have and the budget you get. There's still great things that can be done with it, but seeing where you get your job can be a thing that inspires or deflates a graduate's hopes.