Читать книгу How to plan a library building for library work - Charles C. Soule - Страница 26

Table of Contents

The buildings to cost over a million dollars are likely to be in the state, public or university classes. Some of their peculiar phases will be discussed under those heads. The features they have in common are size, material and construction, entrances, stack, relation of stack to reading rooms, underground stories, stairs and elevators.

Material and construction are perhaps the most problematical. As has already been questioned, must libraries be of solid stone construction like most of our recent public buildings? Must they be gloomy dungeons like our typical custom-houses? One objection to massive and imposing build is the burden of shade imposed on the inside rooms and corridors by thick walls, deep window embrasures, rows of columns, porticos and overhanging cornices. Can they not be given sufficient dignity and yet be of modern steel construction, like our business blocks that are so light and airy? Or, if an imposing front be necessary, why not plan it with columns, portico and approaches, as a mere façade to mask three other exterior walls and partitions of light construction? One important consideration toward this end is the belief of librarians that every building may require alteration, enlargement, possibly replacement in less than a generation, and ought not therefore to be too solid.

Why not put the stacks on the front and sides, thus giving a light construction tone to the building?

If such a daring experiment could be made for a very large library, it would lead to omission of impressive outside stairs and rows of useless columns, which often incumber entrances and largely increase the cost of library buildings.

The stack, still in the course of development in smaller libraries, must be studied as the principal problem in a very large library.

Room to store enormous and continually enlarging stocks of books will be required. Where to put the reading rooms is a minor problem, the chief query being where to give them the best daylight, either outside, or on courtyards, or under the roof; to leave ample space for them, not too far from books and administration rooms. Could a large enough stack be built on what might be called the daylight fronts and the daylight stories? The question of dark, central or underground stacks will be discussed in a separate chapter. It is only outlined here as one of the chief problems of the very large building.

Elevators and mechanical carriers, house telephones or speaking tubes will furnish larger problems the larger the building is to be.

Inside stairs and passages, just large enough, no larger, than will be required for use, and so carefully placed as to unite, rather than separate, departments of the library, will in themselves be a special study both in service and in economy of space and cost. The more unnecessary cubic space, width, length and height, you waste on them, the more your library will cost to build, and the more will be the annual expense of caring for it and of repairing it.