Building for relevance and flexibility can ensure your library will be there to help patrons navigate rapidly changing times

A perfect storm of change is gathering on the horizon. Climate destabilization, peak oil, population growth, and the acceleration of consumption in the developing world point to dramatic increases in energy, food, and materials costs. As population and demand for resources grow, key life-support resources like productive soil, fresh water, and fisheries continue to decline. How will libraries help their communities and campuses cope with looming global challenges that may require dramatic shifts in the way we live? How will library operating budgets accommodate future dramatic increases in utility costs and meet local financial challenges? How can you “future-proof” your library? A future-proof library builds on the concept of sustainable, or green, design to include consideration of how the building will respond to rapid, unpredictable change that will continue to transform our social, economic, and environmental reality. Most buildings die from lack of relevance, not from a lack of physical integrity. Future-proof libraries are designed for perpetual relevance through a process that engages the community and the built-in ability to respond to changing needs. A future-proof library design strives to create places that are lovable, responsive, energy productive, resource effective, disaster resistant, and perpetually significant. Future-proof libraries thrive on change.

Design for lovability

Lovable libraries are not just places that people return to; they are places people return to with their friends and neighbors in tow. They make people feel elevated, comfortable, and social. Lovable libraries are more likely to be used, maintained, fought for, and preserved for generations. Unloved libraries are bulldozer bait, forever destined to be underfunded and underdefended when money is tight. Loved libraries are grant magnets, deemed essential to the communities they serve. Lovable libraries are best designed with a live audience of stakeholders and users to determine the best response to their unique local economic, social, cultural, and environmental context. When the design process is divorced from the community, the inaccuracies of secondhand communication and erroneous preconceptions and the lack of direct creative intercourse can result in a product that is sterile and out of place. Including a café may sound like a great program element, but not if the community's favorite coffee shop is a block away. Finally, libraries that are loved have deep connections to the unique essence of their communities. They are woven into the fabric of residents' daily activities and resonate with the spirit, history, tradition, and culture of the neighborhood or the campus. Their locations are central to the paths people take on their daily treks. In the future, these treks may be shorter, more walkable, or more connected by mass transit and generally part of a more localized and collaborative way of life as fuel, food, and energy costs continue to rise. Consider how pedestrians and cyclists will reach your library and consider accommodating staff who bike or jog to work with a shower and changing area.

Design to support staff

As it has always been and always will be, the real key to a facility's lovability is the quality and attitude of the staff. How can future-proof buildings enhance staff excellence? They are designed to boost comfort, improve indoor air quality, and provide natural ventilation, daylighting, and views for the majority of occupants. Studies of green buildings certified through the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) building rating system show that these high-performance environments are an aid to recruiting staff, reducing their health claims, and improving their attendance, productivity, and retention. A well-planned building designed for open sight lines from staff workstations provides more effective use of precious staff resources and makes them more available for the kind of personal service that will make the library a more pleasant and productive experience for visitors. This is best accomplished with extensive staff input to determine the optimal placement of adjacent functions for most efficient workflow. Open sight lines and clear signage and wayfinding also make the user experience more intuitive and less stressful.

Design that can respond

Future-proof libraries can grow, shrink, adjust, and adapt to a changing context. In the future, expect to see more demands for flexibility in facilities of all kinds. Office environments, with their rapid churn rates, offer some lessons in how to design an environment that can be reconfigured with minimal cost, time, and service disruption. One strategy often borrowed from that building type for new library design is a raised-floor plenum system in combination with a structural system that minimizes interior columns. At Ohio Township Central Library, Newburgh, IN, for example, the main collection space has a 120' clear-span roof and a raised-floor plenum. A raised-floor plenum allows for almost ductless delivery of heating, cooling, and ventilation in a manner that offers better indoor air quality and comfort along with energy cost savings. It also allows for plug-and-play rewiring for power and data. Raised-floor systems are offset by the avoided cost of the ductwork, there being less floor-to-ceiling height required, and the ability to do away with ceiling systems that hide the ductwork. Owing to the lack of columns and the movability of all systems, this library can be easily reconfigured. Large trusses that make the long span possible also provide height for north-facing clerestory windows that daylight 100 percent of the collection space. By spanning from the low side of one truss to the high side of the next, the sawtooth roof creates south-facing slopes for solar collectors to make the building less dependent on the grid. Most of the rest of the interior walls are built on top of the raised floor system, with the building designed for future expansion to the north. When that occurs, most of those interior walls can be removed, and the spaces that now serve the administration offices can be readily repurposed for public use as the building floor plan changes.

Carving out multipurpose space

In an existing building, it may not be possible to achieve that level of flexibility, but in most cases it is feasible to carve out multiuse, reconfigurable space with mobile furnishings in the meeting room, for example. Some libraries without the means to expand and without large meeting spaces have adapted by putting at least a portion of their collection on wheels, to be rolled out of the way for special programs. Thorntown, IN, with a population of 1000, recently expanded its hyperactive Carnegie Library to provide multipurpose program spaces that handle everything from teen cooking classes (taught by a local attorney) to wood-carving classes to luncheons for senior citizens. Libraries of all types, sizes, and budgets should consider boosting their capacity to learn new tricks, lest they find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.

Form follows multiple functions

Nature achieves beauty through the simple elegance of multiple uses for each form, e.g., a blade of grass or a tree limb. Building designs that achieve this also save economic, human, and natural resources. At Seattle's Ballard Branch Library, a dramatic sheltering roof keeps the water out but also provides apertures for daylighting, with sun-tracking mirrors, solar electric power, and an extensive living green roof mix of self-sustaining, drought-tolerant, indigenous grasses and sedums planted in a pattern that mimics a windborne casting of seeds. The living green roof slows stormwater runoff, cools the interior, and extends the life of the roof membrane by moderating temperature extremes and ultraviolet radiation. Another example is the multipurpose sawtooth roof of Ohio Township Central Library, covered with a heat-reflective white membrane; the south slopes of the sawtooth clerestories are populated with solar photovoltaic panels and solar hot water panels so they generate power and hot water. The north face of the clerestories let in indirect daylight. How many functions is your roof performing? What other role can it play in your community, your library? Consider using that valuable space for people, nature, power, or light or a combination appropriate to your unique place.

Energy-positive buildings

Both ancient design principles and off-the-shelf renewable energy technology now allow library buildings to make more energy on site than they use. The economic sense of this strategy is beginning to catch up with the environmental imperative. In a carbon-constrained world, energy-positive buildings offer a potential wedge in the climate change solution and a hedge against rising operating expenses. A February 2008 report by Citigroup predicted that coal prices will double in 2008–09 owing to both increased global demand, especially from China and India, and weather-related supply bottlenecks caused by snowstorms in China and flooded coal mines in Australia. Add to those factors increased regulation of air pollution from coal-fired power plants and the likelihood of some form of carbon cap and trade system, and you have the potential for breathtaking increases in utility costs in the next couple of years. The new 2400 square foot Chrisney Branch Library of the Lincoln Heritage Public Library, IN, will feature an extremely energy-efficient building envelope designed for passive natural ventilation and natural daylight. For backup heating and cooling, a geothermal heat pump will borrow energy from the earth. Located on land donated by the North Spencer County School Corporation adjacent to Chrisney Elementary School's outdoor learning lab, the new branch will be powered by an array of solar electric panels mounted on a Learning Power Pavilion that doubles as an outdoor classroom for the library and the school. It also serves to place the solar electric panels in the sun while the building enjoys the shade of several century-old trees. Now under construction, this project bid at under $140 per square foot for construction and will be fully funded by state and federal grants and local donations. Its 8.9 kilowatt solar photovoltaic system is designed to produce as much energy as the building uses.

Resource effective

Future-proof design attempts to eliminate waste completely through thoughtful consideration of the life cycle of the building and its contents. Owing to the success of the LEED green building rating system, a growing body of knowledge is accumulating about what products are the most effective over their entire life in reducing environmental impact, waste, energy use, and toxicity. Many LEED-certified projects have diverted more than 95 percent of their demolition and construction waste from the landfill. By designing a future-proof building for durability, flexibility, adaptability, expandability, and low maintenance, future waste can be avoided. Ultimately, design that allows for repurposing, reconfiguring, or reuse of the building and its components will also allow it to have a future somewhere besides the landfill.

Managing water

As water becomes ever more precious, techniques for its preservation have grown ever more elegant and cost-effective. Ohio Township Central Library captures all site water in its detention pond and then uses that water for irrigation of the seven-acre site. Other libraries, such as the new main library in Santa Monica, CA, use cisterns to collect and store rainwater. By employing water-saving fixtures and appliances, you will save not only water but the energy needed to pump and heat the water as well. Features that let water soak into the ground slowly, like rain gardens, bioswales, porous pavement, and green roofs, can also help solve a common problem many cities have with stormwater runoff that overwhelms combined sewers, causing raw sewage overflows into streams and rivers. Employing these strategies may also allow you to develop more of your site, reduce requirements for ponds and pipes, or qualify you for water and sewer fee discounts in some jurisdictions.

Optimize economical performance

A building designed to meet code is the worst building you can legally build. The initial cost for a code-minimum building may be less than an energy productive building, but the long-term costs will certainly be higher. A better way of thinking about building design, especially for a library, is to attempt to optimize long-term return on investment. This approach typically includes designing for durability, low maintenance, low energy use, and generally lower cost of operation. An approach that emphasizes long-term cost effectiveness generally includes a better building envelope (walls, windows, doors, insulation, cladding, roof) and better building systems (lighting, plumbing, heating, cooling, ventilation). Through an integrated approach that includes extensive computer modeling of energy, lighting, and air flow during design, it is possible to provide a better building at virtually the same cost as a code-minimum building. For example, adding insulation to exterior walls or reflective roofing or better glazing will allow a downsizing of the heating, ventilation, and cooling equipment. In an optimized building design, the decrease in the need for heating and cooling capacity will often pay for improvements in the building envelope. When Evansville-Vanderburgh PL, IN, was designing its new earth-sheltered Oaklyn Branch, which features a national-award-winning meadow roof, its design team conducted a complete alternative energy model and initial cost model comparing that design with an alternative, conventional design. That exercise showed that the earth-sheltered model would not only offer energy savings but was less expensive to build. Although the deep meadow roof was much more expensive than a conventional roof, the overall design allowed for three subgrade walls to be made of relatively inexpensive cast concrete, which lowered the cost of the overall project. In order to achieve this optimal synergy of performance and cost, it is critical to model building performance accurately during the early conceptual or schematic design stages to derive the best balance of cost and performance of the building and its systems. By contrast, tacked-on green features appended late in design or during construction often only add to the cost of the project with no net return on investment. In existing structures, energy modeling may provide similar benefits. In one historic building being considered for a library conversion, the initial design for the heating and AC equipment exceeded the load capacity of the old third floor and called for extensive structural changes. When a white reflective roof was plugged in to the model, it allowed a downsizing of the AC system, which allowed the mechanical room equipment to fit within the structural capacity limits of the existing floor. This simple change could significantly reduce the initial expense and the long-term cost of the project. In his 2007 update to his study of green building costs and benefits, “Cost of Green Revisited: Reexamining the Feasibility and Cost Impact of Sustainable Design in the Light of Increased Market Adoption,” cost estimating consultant Davis Langdon looked at 25 LEED-seeking and 32 non-LEED-seeking completed library projects. The study included community branches, main public libraries, and university campus facilities. LEED library projects tended to score well in indoor environmental quality. Langdon found “no indication that the LEED-seeking projects tend to be any more expensive than the non-LEED projects.” In fact, the green library projects tended to fall more toward the lower end of the overall cost scale. He also noted that “this category has one of the highest green to nongreen ratios. Over the past several years, libraries have become one of the more common categories of new construction to embrace sustainable design.” Libraries were early adopters of the concept of green buildings, and their architects are among the most experienced green building designers, which helps explain the cost-effectiveness of green designs. Green libraries, on average, also save in excess of 30 percent on energy costs alone. This factor will increase in significance as energy expenditures continue to rise, but factors such as increased productivity and reduced absenteeism have greater economic impact, owing to the high relative cost of human resources compared with building operating costs.

Disaster-resistant design

Of course, all the good design in the world is no good if a building fails in the face of a disaster. Disaster resistance begins with site planning and site selection and proceeds to include consideration of all the major risks to the continued integrity and safety of the building and its occupants. If your chosen site puts you in harm's way of an avoidable threat, such as being in a flood-zone, keep looking. If you can't relocate to a safer spot, recent history has taught many lessons about design for resistance to hurricanes, tornadoes, drought, wild fires, and floods. It's time to incorporate those lessons into library buildings, regardless of whether minimum code requires it. One way a library can remain relevant in the future is if it remains in operation in an emergency. when other public buildings have been compromised. Bev Martin, director of Johnson County PL, IN, recently related a story about her county's experience with a historic deluge that dropped 11" of rain in less than 24 hours. Although much of the town of Franklin was flooded, the libraries were up and running while some city and county offices were closed owing to this “500-year flood.” Citizens waded through floodwaters to use the library computers to access disaster recovery information and fill out assistance forms. Chrisney and Galveston (see “30 Years Ahead,” above) libraries were designed with disaster-resistant building envelopes that substantially exceed code requirements for structural strength, wind uplift, lateral forces (like high wind and earthquake forces), and penetration by flying objects (important in a severe thunderstorm or tornado), the most common disaster threats in Indiana. In other areas, the primary threat may be wildfires, flooding, earthquakes, or hurricanes. With each potential threat, the architects and engineers should consider how the building might be sited or designed to avoid or survive it. Power and water are casualties in a disaster; the design should consider how the building might operate with the loss of external power or water supply. Libraries can be designed to generate their own power with renewable energy, as with the Chrisney and Galveston branches, or a simpler approach would be to provide automatic emergency generator backup. Today's libraries should be designed to use natural daylight and natural ventilation. This passive approach to survivability also pays dividends daily in terms of reducing operating costs and providing a more pleasing and productive learning environment, as mentioned earlier. This is also the approach familiar to the original design of most Carnegie-era libraries and is compatible with historic structures. Architects in that generation had an intuitive knowledge of such techniques passed down through the ages. Today's architects are relearning those traditional design techniques and applying modern computer modeling to assure that daylighting and natural ventilation strategies actually work. A combination of active and passive disaster-resistant design elements will make a future-proof library more likely to be up and running after a violent storm or other catastrophic event that might disable most of the rest of the buildings in the area. Such a building would be extremely valuable to its community in its time of greatest need, and it would serve as an effective teaching tool for others seeking to create a disaster-resistant environment. Disaster-resistant design may further reduce your insurance bills. The Institute for Business and Home Safety is a good resource for more information on what it calls “fortified buildings” (www.disastersafety.org).

Leading the way

We live in a time of drastic, disruptive change. Libraries can be part of the answer to the daunting challenges we face by leading learners to a place that illustrates, in its own form, the lessons it teaches. In doing so, libraries will create their own opportunities to inherit the future.

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Author Information

William M. Brown, AIA, LEED AP, an Associate Partner at Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf Architects (www.bdmd.com) in Indianapolis, has been practicing high-performance green library design for 15 years. He blogs at frombrowntogreen.blogspot.com