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These California projects show that a low-cost approach can pay off with big returns

Article excerpt: A review of recent plans and completed projects at a variety of California libraries instills a sense of excitement about the possibilities inherent in taking a low-cost approach to the remodeling of libraries. Interviews with sources involved with recent projects throughout the state reveal much of the thinking that has guided successful fiscally frugal remodeling efforts.

Linda Demmers, for example, has served as a consultant on projects as elaborate as the information commons in the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Library at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and the Learning Commons, Technology Center, and Library at the University of Santa Clara in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Demmers consistently seeks ways to adapt what she has learned to meet the needs of clients with fewer resources. She acknowledges that low-cost remodeling can involve as little as repainting an area with attractive colors or adding new, vibrant signage.

“Low cost” can also be a relative term, depending on an organization’s financial resources; one academic library had planned to pursue a $30-million project to create an entirely new building, but is now planning to spend considerably less—approximately $1 million—to remodel an existing building. Developing an overall project description—the building program—helps those with limited resources to divide projects into manageable pieces while not losing the overall cohesiveness a master plan provides.

Success, says Demmers, begins by not concentrating solely on existing problems: “Start thinking about tomorrow’s problems and don’t make everything so specific.” An example is avoiding niches created specifically for a piece of equipment such as a photocopy machine or some other existing feature that may have already disappeared. “I had an architect recently who tried to design a circ desk with slots for date-due cards,” she notes.

Demmers also recommends looking for ways to upgrade existing spaces by improving signage; adding interior finishes such as painting, carpeting, or items that can be placed on existing walls or columns; and eliminating outmoded services to provide space for functions that will attract users back into areas they have abandoned.

Examples of such visual improvements include a project at Anaheim Central Library incorporating clouds painted on a ceiling, the full-scale figure of a giraffe, and colorful carpeting installed in the children’s library. The City of Orange Main Library added attractive ceiling decorations to hide unattractive light fixtures ...

... Other projects underway include one that Demmers is currently working on with architect Rick D’Amato and interior designer Chris Lentz—both with the Irvine, California–based LPA Inc. architecture firm—remodeling the County of Los Angeles Public Library’s Malibu Library. The project involves phased work within a building that was originally completed in 1963 and has just under 13,000 square feet of space. The goal is to create a community space that attracts 30 to 40% more people per year than are currently visiting the building.

“The Malibu remodel is finding space by removing a four-person circ desk and two-person reference desk [and replacing them with] one customer-service station,” Demmers explains. An unused circulation collection is being removed to add “more comfortable seating and a dedicated children’s space.”

“One thing that is really special about Malibu is their connection to their history and to their community,” D’Amato notes. He and Lentz are proposing low-cost alterations that will incorporate that sense of connection into everything that is done, such as creating an abstract version of a lighthouse within the building as a reference to a local home that was built in the shape of a lighthouse.

To create connections to the area’s equestrian past, a community meeting room will include colors and materials suggestive of stables without trying to literally re-create a stable within the library. Wall-sized photography is also being incorporated into the project. “It’s very inexpensive to do that, to blow up photographs and put them on an entire wall,” D’Amato says. “What we’re doing is treating them like wallpaper. They’re done on vinyl; you can take an entire wall and create an image.”

“The whole point is, if you have a goal or a story or a theme, it helps to drive the decisions,” Lentz adds. “You’re not just decorating the space. There’s a meaning behind it, and it means something to the community… There are things that we want to highlight, so you play up the special features of the building.”

At a cost of $5 million, another project that D’Amato and Lentz are working on, the Santa Fe Springs Library, is far from low-cost; but a glance at the plans provides ideas for anyone interested in how they can adapt an existing space to meet the changing needs of library users while building flexibility and a sense of library as place into the remodeled space. “Their whole library is going to revolve around a coffee house,” D’Amato notes.

That does not mean that traditional and new uses are secondary: With a circular space in the center of the building dedicated to the coffee shop, a variety of open spaces providing various services wrap around that space: main book collections; a children’s area; a young adult area; computer terminals grouped together in an area close to study and literacy rooms; an information desk that is nearly as centrally located as the coffee shop; a reading/quiet area somewhat removed from the coffee shop; a community room; and a staff area. Space adjacent to the building includes an outdoor reading garden.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how a library with a smaller budget than is available for the Santa Fe Springs project could rearrange existing spaces both inside and outside a building to create a central focus and specially grouped spaces to meet its own needs ...

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