“A building committee is not likely to secure what it wants by copying or even by competition.”—Eastman.[78]
Study precedents always and thoroughly, but do not try to follow any of them implicitly, nor expect to find a type or model you can imitate.
Study of Other Libraries
By Visit. The best preparation for planning, and later the best test and corrective of your plans, will lie in visits to other libraries of like grade, size, character, and constituency as your own, especially if their librarians are intelligent, experienced, and thoroughly frank about both the merits and the faults of their buildings, and will tell you what to avoid as well as what to imitate. Observe carefully (with note-book and pencil in hand) size and collocation of rooms; height of walls; dimensions and make of furniture; suitability and finish of all materials; effect of coloring; placing and size of windows; distribution, effectiveness, and economy of artificial lights; all the various points which will aid you in solving your own problems. Carry a measuring tape, and get all dimensions down to scale. If your architect can go with you, at least on a second or review trip, so much the better. If he cannot do this, have specific recommendations ready for him at your next conference.
Examining Plans. Next to personal visits, intelligent inspection and comparison of plans will help you after you have gone some way toward formulating your own plans. I would not advise too premature, or too promiscuous study of plans. There are so many accessible to a searcher, of so many different grades, and such varying degrees of excellence, that indiscriminate and reckless inspection is very apt to bring on mental dyspepsia.
Disregard at first exteriors, which distract attention from essentials. Confine yourself to floor plans and interiors of libraries of your own size and class. Preferably take modern plans, certainly those of leading libraries in all sections which are imbued with the modern progressive ideas. You will find no lack of material. If you use it wisely and eclectically, it will help clarify your ideas. Note the plans which seem to you best; go back to them again and again; at each study discard those which are less satisfactory; and when you have reduced your list to a few very nearly right, compare them with your own sketches until you are quite sure that you have incorporated all their best points.
You will not perhaps have much access to English books. If you do you will find interesting views and plans in Duff-Brown, Burgoyne, Champneys, and Cotgreave; but they will hardly help you much, because English methods are somewhat different from ours. Some late plans for large libraries, given in “The Librarian,” seem to show wasteful attempts at architectural effect. Three things in the plans of small English libraries, you will note, and should learn from—the clever adaptation of irregular sites, the effective use of top-light, and the economy of space in entrance halls.
In America there are plans in plenty. The most helpful are the most recent.
Koch has over a hundred plans from all parts of the country, including branches, most of them costing from $10,000 to $50,000. But as yet he has no letter-press to explain the plans.