How to plan a library building for library work

by Charles C. Soule

Areas are often used to light basement windows, but they are apt to catch rubbish and in winter to invite snowdrifts, which are difficult to clean out. Where they must be used they are better if extended to form a sort of moat, wide enough to be reached by a special flight of steps, for use in cleaning, and lined with white stone or glazed brick to reflect light into the basement.

Courtyards. In large buildings, a large courtyard admits light to all the interior walls, but is usually too wasteful of space. The interior is generally used either for delivery, reading or stack; not solidly occupying the whole available space; lighted from the top, and so shaped as to leave small corner courtyards as shafts for light and air. If the walls of these shafts are faced with glazed brick, they may light, very effectively, inside rooms, passages and stairs.

Kept Open. In the Boston Public Library, the central space was planned for architectural effect, and left open. This arrangement, if the interior walls had windows planned for light, rather than for effect, would render both faces of all four sides of the building, available for useful rooms; but as it is, adequate light is not given to rooms, and thus is wasted. When attention was called to this waste, and to the disjunctive effect which threw communications out to exterior lines, the advocates of the scheme enlarged upon the opportunities it would give for readers to carry books out there and read under the æsthetic effects of a canopy which excludes direct light from the lower story, as the monks of old are pictured as using their arcades. With this in mind I have often peered out there from the staircase windows, but have never detected such a reader. The present effect may please æsthetic visitors, but I doubt if it could secure a vote from practical modern librarians.

Central Reading Room. With the huge reading rooms of the Library of Congress and the British Museum in mind, anyone can understand this use, which is striking. Whether it is the ideal form for a reading-room is more doubtful. It certainly, when high, wastes a deal of room in upper space, not needed for light or ventilation, and it needlessly blocks light which might render the inner fronts of the building useful for various purposes. In this position of the reading or delivery room, the corresponding stack would cross the rear, and perhaps range along the sides of the rectangle.

Central Delivery. Another use is for the main delivery, with generally a lower roof than a reading-room would have unless obstructive. If light for this is drawn from above it will be ample for enough floor shelving to bring certain parts of the open-access books near to the desk and catalog.

Stacks. Sometime in the future, all the central space of a large building may be given to a solid stack, from sub-cellars to roof, lighted only by electricity, ventilated from above by forced draught, and opening on reading and administrative rooms all around.

But until this era of dark storage (which heaven forfend!) there is a possibility of stacks in the form of cross-sections, or a Greek cross, with corner areas for light and air, and feeding a smaller central room for reading or delivery, or even feeding suites of reading rooms around the perimeter after the fashion of the Library of Congress building.

Combination. Still another use of the center space is possible (as in the new Brooklyn Central Library plans): stories of stacks below, delivery-room above, on the level with the ground floor of the building; the reading room above that.

Dark Places. There will inevitably come corners in every building where full light cannot get in. Some faulty buildings are full of such corners. Study the plans you find, to detect such faults and avoid them. When your own plans, after all your care, disclose such spots of darkness, think over your various needs and see if some use cannot be made of such otherwise wasted gaps. There are some closets, even rooms, which do not require any light, or require it so seldom that a flash of electric light, now and then, will serve almost as well as daylight. For instance, there is the book vault, the photographic dark room, many closets for supplies, shelves for duplicates; heaters, coal bunks, ash and waste paper bins, et id genus omne. All such that you can relegate to places hopelessly dark, will leave so much more free daylight to be used.