Build a sense of safety in and outside of the library

At LJ’s recent Design Institute in Missoula, MT, the term places of refuge came up several times. It was new to me, but the meaning was clear from the context: individual-scale spots within the larger, communal library, whether literally separate, such as sensory rooms where neurodiverse patrons can control the light, sound, and other aspects of their environment, or semi-separate nooks—or even, one designer suggested, part of a larger space delineated with ceiling height, lighting, acoustic treatments, and furnishings. While soaring atriums create a sense of spacious possibility and wonder, these human-scale spots create a mood of comfort and safety, like Jane Eyre reading in her curtained window seat.

I particularly noted interior designer Mindy Sorg’s call to build such spaces for adults, and not just in the children’s area. I have long wished that the playful sensibilities of kids’ and teen library spaces would be similarly applied to adult needs and interests. It might help retain users who age out of the teen room but have not been brought back by parenthood, a demographic many public libraries struggle to attract. I see in the Year in Architecture that designers are answering Sorg’s call, offering adult-sized cubbies that are not only practical, but also delightful.

In a larger sense, of course, the whole library serves as a place of refuge, an integral part of the larger community, yet self-contained within it. It’s this function that libraries serve when they become cooling centers in heatwaves, or, as now in the UK, warming centers when the rising cost of heating oil threatens winter well-being. It’s the function that the Missoula Public Library serves in smoke emergencies, filtering air to provide respite for those struggling with air quality in their homes. It’s what libraries do when they offer families displaced by floods a chance to charge their devices and entertain their children.

But the refuge the library can offer is inherently temporary. For libraries to help make their whole communities places of refuge, libraries need to facilitate long-term planning for resilience to disasters that are more frequent and severe—plus, support government policy changes to slow and perhaps reverse that progression.

On the individual level, that can look like programs and collections that help patrons make a go bag, an evacuation plan, or a home smoke filter. It can also look like helping survivors navigate the often daunting bureaucracy to get help from FEMA or collect on an insurance claim. On the governmental level, it might mean hosting open data on the local impacts of climate change—heat, rising sea levels, flooding, storms—and the hackathons that turn data into accessible visualizations and tools. It might mean offering research assistance to local elected officials about solutions implemented in comparable areas. On the communal level, it might mean hosting forums so the community can learn firsthand about the impact on farmers, fishing workers, homeowners, and others. Or libraries could host neighborhood science projects.

And of course, it means modeling sustainable choices. Some of these are codified in standards like LEED. But some sit outside the building process. Siting your building on a public transit route improves equitable access, but it also can decrease fossil fuel use. Applying this and other examples of sustainability thinking to service design as well as building design can make a greater ongoing impact—and being public about the reasons for those choices, even more so.

Focusing on reducing costs to the taxpayer has the potential to reach audiences who are never going to come for an exhibit on global warming. Libraries and architects can explain how building in a flood plain would incur repeated reconstruction expenses, or that passive solutions to heating or cooling reduce power bills, and will keep patrons and staff comfortable even in an outage.

As Rebekkah Smith Aldrich frequently says in her Sustainability column, the “triple bottom line” of profit, people, and the planet guides sustainable thinking. By emphasizing all three of those aspects not just in their decision-making, but in their public communications, libraries can drive greater understanding and buy-in from their communities.