To calculate cubes, outside measurements of the walls should be taken for the square area, and the height should be measured from the floor of the basement to the roof, or to half-way from eaves to ridge-pole, if the roof is not flat.
Limiting Annual Outlay. In planning remember to watch not only first cost, but future expense of running your library. The more expensive your material, the larger its maintenance will probably be for care and repair. The larger your halls and stairways, the more diffuse your rooms, the farther departments are separated, the more wasteful your heating and lighting, the more your service will cost. Good planning may easily save you ten per cent on first cost, and twenty per cent every year for the life of the building—a whole generation. Calculate this saving for yourself, and be careful!
“It is impossible to have good administration without a building properly planned,”—The Libr. Asst.[90]
An architect generally overlooks those essentials which may appear trivial, yet are of the greatest importance.—Ibid.
Cutting Down Cost. From the first a wise planner will study to limit expense in every detail. After all possible economy, however, the wants will so outrun the possibilities, that when architect and librarian and adviser have agreed on a plan and it has been accepted by the building committee, the first experimental estimates will go beyond the limit.
On what points will it be possible to cut down, without serious sacrifice, from the library point of view?
In the first place, size. As cost is largely in proportion to cubic contents, every cubic foot saved pares down expense. It will generally be hard to spare floor area anywhere, but there can often be reduction of height in rooms or floors. The only real library requisites of height are air-capacity, and reach of light from windows across rooms. The architect often wants certain heights for architectural effect,—but always try to pin him down to what is actually necessary for comfort in every room, and point out where mezzanine rooms would serve in high stories.
In the next place comes ornament, exterior and interior. In the John Hay library at Brown University, several thousand dollars’ expense was saved by omitting the cornice around the outside rear wall of the stack room, without sacrifice of effect. In the Brookline cut-down,[91] several thousand dollars were saved by omitting two ornamental but superfluous gardens outside.
In a city, try to get the park department to assume the cost of laying out the library grounds.