Designing Chicago's Library of the Future - Part One: Two Very Different Ideas for a Central Library, in Chicago and Seattle

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 In our digital age, where more and more knowledge is �in the cloud� and local governments veer towards bankruptcy, what does the future hold for the neighborhood library?

In Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's first budget, nearly half of all the layoffs came from the staff of the Chicago Public Library.  Hours of operation at the systems 76 branches had previously been cut from 64 to 48 hours a week.  Rahm pruned it even further, down to 40, with Monday now a closed day.

By this summer, just two years later, many of those hours had been restored, and Emanuel was cutting the ribbon on the CPL's 80th branch library, inside the new Back of the Yards High School, heralding it as the future of the system even as, the following week, he was announcing a major new standalone library for Chinatown. Before we talk about the branches in part two of this series, we're going back downtown for a look at the central libraries that are at the center of the neighborhood networks.

As a word, library is inextricably tied to the idea of knowledge through the physical objects of its conveyance: librarium, Latin for "chest for books", derived from liber, for paper or parchment. Bochord, old English for a horde of books.  Librairie, old French for a collection of books.  And, of course,  adormirebiblioteca, old Italian for the place where students sleep.

So you'd think the death of the book would mean the end of libraries.  Except you'd be wrong, for at least a couple of reasons . . .

A.  The idea of what a library is is in accelerating re-definition.
B.   Like Mark Twain, the book may be destined to expire, but, for the moment at least, reports of its death are highly exaggerated.

Library of Birmingham, England (photo courtesy Mecanoo)

Ambitious new central libraries continue to be built.  One opened in Madison, Wisconsin in 2010.  Ground broke for a new $120 million central library in Austin, by Lake Flato Architects, this past May, and just last month,  a massive new $294 million central library opened in Birmingham, England, designed by the Dutch architectural firm Mecanoo.

1897 Chicago Public Library, now the Chicago Cultural Center

Chicago came to its own terms of what a central library should be a long time ago, back in the 1980's.  The previous decade, the administration of Mayor Richard J. Daley had kicked the main library out of its long-time home in Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge's elegant 1897 people's palace on Michigan Avenue and left it to find makeshift quarters in an old Mandel Brothers warehouse behind the Equitable Building, about where the Gleacher Center can be found today.

After Mayor Jane Byrne considered housing a new central library in Holabird and Roche's terra-cotta clad former Goldblatt's Store on State Street (now DePaul Center), her successor, Harold Washington, committed to building an entirely new building at State and Van Buren, and held a competition for its design.

model, Murphy/Jahn entry to Chicago Central Library Competition

Against striking modernist entries from the likes of Arthur Erickson, Dirk Lohan and Helmut Jahn, the city decided to board the short-lived Post-Modernist express by picking the entry from Hammond, Beeby and Babka . . .

. . . traditionalist both in design and in being not especially curious about where, functionally, libraries might be headed in the future.  (Other than in creating a handsome Winter Garden so separated from the library, itself, that it seemed less a public amenity than a revenue strategy for wedding rentals.)

And so it was left, not to Chicago - the city that prides itself on cutting-edge architecture - but Seattle, to build the first major structure that actually tried to imagine the library of the future.

Designed by OMA's Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus, the Seattle Library included everything from avatar guides . . . 

to mixing rooms . . .

living rooms . . .

a continuous book �spiral� . . .

. . . and a meeting room corridor as red as the inside of a beating heart . .  .

The jury is still out about how much Koolhaas and Price-Ramus got right.   The Seattle Library was designed before e-books and the iPad, before Bezos laid waste to Borders, but its design drew upon decades of thinking - through competitions, speculations and, yes, books - about what library architecture could be.  In Chicago, that kind of innovation has been left to places like the Helmut Jahn-designed Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago, opened last year.

Mansueto Library (left) Walter Netsch's Regenstein Library, 1970 (right)

After easing long-time Chicago Public Library Commission Mary Dempsey out the door with his draconian cutbacks, Rahm Emanuel appointed 37-year-old Brian Bannon as her replacement.  Bannon actually got to see the evolution of the new Seattle Public Library firsthand.  A Washington State native, he was a manager at the Seattle Library.  He was mentored by City Librarian Deborah Jacobs even as she worked with Koolhaas and Josh Ramus in developing the concepts behind the Seattle's ambitious new library.  In 2006, Bannon moved on to San Francisco, where he managed that city's 27 neighborhood branches and oversaw $200 million in upgrades.  In 2011, he became the SFPL's chief information officer.

Bannon's technology focus quickly made its stamp on the traditionalist Harold L. Washington.  This past July, in a space previously hosting a viewing area for a video on the library's history,  something called The Maker Lab debuted, offering free workshops, demonstrations and open-lab hours for a 3-D printing facility.

Next . . . Part Two: The evolution of the Chicago Public Library branch and its architecture, and two very different bets on its future.

Read More:

Robots take over - from diapers.com to Helmut Jahn's Mansueto Library at the U of C

Settling for Less - The Road to Chicago's Harold L. Washington Library

Sleekness in Seattle - OMA's new Seattle Public Library

Master of Tradition: Thomas Beeby receives Driehaus Award Saturday; documentary The Invisible Hand debuts on WTTW Thursday

Harris Theater, Millennium Park, Chicago (click images for larger view)

Update: photographs from the award ceremony here.

It was announced all the way back in December, but on Saturday, March 23rd, architect Thomas Beeby will be finally be presented with the 2013 Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame,  which honors �lifetime contributions to traditional, classical, and sustainable architecture and urbanism in the modern world.�  The award comes with $200,000 and a classically-styled trophy that looks a bit like a Monopoly token on steroids, but is actually a bronze miniature of the Choregic Monument of Lysikrates.

Beeby, born in 1941, is chairman emeritus of HBRA Architects.  He was educated at Cornell, and later at Yale where he eventually became Dean of Architecture.  Beeby was one of the founding members of the Chicago Seven, named after a notorious group of 60's activists indicted and tried for their tactics in opposing the war in Vietnam.  The architect's Chicago Seven, which also included Stanley Tigerman, Larry Booth, Stuart Cohen, James Freed, James Nagle and Ben Weese, rebelled against the constraints of Miesian modernism as it ossified after the master's death.

United States Federal Building and Courthouse, Tuscaloosa - photo: driehausprize.org

Although united in their opposition to the straightjacket of Mies, the rebellion took a number of different forms, from trendy Post-Modernism to a more serious commitment to neo-classicism on the part of architects like Beeby.  In 2011, the opening of his Federal Courthouse in Tuscaloosa was seen as a major victory in the war on modernism in that Beeby's Greek Temple design replaced what was originally supposed to be a more contemporary building by Carol Ross Barney, architect of the Federal Building that replaced the Alfred P. Murrah office building in Oklahoma City bombed by Timothy McVeigh.  Barney's design was deep-sixed by Alabama Republican Senator Richard Shelby, who wanted something more traditionally imperial for a structure that's rumored will eventually take on his name.  (Truth be told, the sheer awfulness of Charles H McCauley Associates' 1964 Tuscaloosa County Courthouse is almost enough to put anyone off not just modernism, but architecture, period.)

Harold L. Washington Library, Chicago

Beeby may be a classicist, but the variety of his designs indicates he's no ideologue.  His solutions are varied and lovingly detailed.  His most famous building in Chicago is undoubtedly the Harold L. Washington Library, on State between Van Buren and Congress.  As we wrote in 2004 in The Road to Chicago's Harold L. Washington Library, Beeby beat out entries from design/build teams that included Canadian architect Arthur Erikson, Dirk Lohan, Skidmore Owning  and Merrill, and a typically daring proposal from Helmut Jahn.  Last time I checked, the models were still on exhibit on the library's 8th floor, and you can also see them all here.

Back in 2004, I wrote of Beeby's design as �Settling for Less�, but my most strident objections were actually more about program.  Although there are now functioning spaces at street level, for years after the library opened, it would take several escalators and the better part of five minutes before you got to anywhere in the building where you would actually find books.

The graceful, sun-filled Winter Garden at the top seems more like a machine for producing rental revenue than a public amenity.  The first floor atrium, complete with round opening into the basement space,  has always struck me as knowing all the notes but not the tune.  Generously proportioned, with mezzanine balconies, it's always seemed to be so four-square that it conveys an uncomfortable, cramped experience.  From the start, however, I've always loved the graceful, naturally-lit reading alcoves lining the outer perimeter of the large floorplates.  To me, this kind of specificity is the real response to the chilly generic quality universal-space modernism often falls preys to.

Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, Ashford, CT - photograph: driehausprize.org

As seems to have become the tradition, the Driehaus is again underwriting a 30-minute documentary on this year's Prize laureate.  Less evaluative than celebratory, they're still entertaining and informative, including extended interviews with the architect being honored.  (It's a bit of a mystery why the Pritzker doesn't do something like it. )  The Invisible Hand: Architect Thomas Beeby, produced by Dan Andries and hosted by Geoffrey Baer, will premiere this Thursday, March 21st at 8:00 p.m. on WTTW, Channel 11, with rebroadcasts Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at  10:30 p.m..

Daniel and Ada L. Rice Building, Art Institute of Chicago

In addition to the award to Beeby, architectural historian David Watkin will be presented this year's Henry Hope Reed Award, which comes with $50,000 and recognizes �an individual outside the practice of architecture who has supported the cultivation of the traditional city, its architecture and art through writing, planning or promotion . . . �

Another great thing about the Driehaus is that this Saturday's ceremony, which takes place at 11:00 a.m., March 23rd, is free and open to the public - no reservations required.    It's a rare opportunity to see inside the uber-classical Marshall and Fox John B. Murphy Memorial Auditorium, 50 East Erie. If it's anything like last year's event, which honored architect Michael Graves, it should be a fascinating morning.

Read:
Of timelessness and kitchen timers: Michael Graves in Chicago.
Michael Graves 2012 Driehaus Award

[from 2004)  The Road to the Harold L. Washington Library
[from 2005] Classicists at the Gate

Thomas Beeby: Art Institute oral history with Betty J. Blum.