The Auburn Public library is so busy that even on ordinary days every seat, hard and soft, has somebody in it.
Space for more seats is one of the best things that will emerge from King County Library System’s plans to renovate and expand the library. But it also will mean additional room for children and teens, more materials, more laptop computers available for checkout and more wireless access.
KCLS officials and a team from Seattle-based Schacht/Aslani Architects met with patrons last week at the library at 1102 Auburn Way S. to talk about the project and review the current design.
The City of Auburn originally pressed for a 20,000-square-foot building in the early 1990s, but funding and other constraints only allowed KCLS to build to 15,000-square-feet. The expansion will add that intendded 5,000 square feet, most noticeably in the form of a glass-paneled addition that will expand into a portion of the parking space on the current east side of the building.
“This really is our fulfillment of the original promise,” said Adrianne Ralph, facilities design coordinator for KCLS. “People use the Auburn Library a lot, and there is definitely a demand for additional seating and additional resources for people to be able to access.”
“We’re adding a lot more space for people to sit at tables and chairs,” added Kay Johnson, KCLS facilities development director.
King County residents supported a $172 million capital bond in September 2004 to pay for the Auburn Library project and other library expansions and renovations. KCLS will close the library for a year to complete the work. It is presently scouting out temporary facilities for its patrons.
Patrons generally were supportive of what they saw but asked KCLS officials to reconsider the parking, which the library shares with the busy Les Gove Campus.
“I think we can probably all live with the idea of not being able to use it for a while,” said one man, “except for one caveat: please revisit the parking issue. That’s going to be a vital thing. If we come here and we can’t use it, we may just go elsewhere. That’s just reality.”
Among the notable additions:
• An expanded children’s area.
• A new meeting room in the northeast corner of the addition that will serve as a quiet space when it is not a meeting room. Where there’s not a gathering in the current meeting room, it is closed, locked and unavailable. The new meeting room will feature sliding glass doors so it may become a much more interactive, multi-use space.
• The relocation of bathrooms to the west side of the building and an expanded entrance way and media area in the space now occupied by the restrooms.
• A quiet study area that will significantly increase the amount of seating space.
• An automated material handling system that will let patrons check in their books and get a receipt for them
• Additional spaces for laptops and additional laptops for check out. The library will keep the same amount of fixed computers,
Ralph said the project will also “open up” the library by reducing the size of the stacks.
“We really think natural light is an important thing, and it helps people function better in the library,” Ralph said. “With that in mind, we want people to be able to enjoy that, and part of doing that is to open up the sight lines so you are not going down rows and rows of super tall stacks. So the non-fiction stacks will continue to be fairly tall. In the fiction stacks, the media stacks of CDs and DVDs, etc., we are going to lower them to 60 inches to give appearance of airiness.”
Walter Schact, principal of Aslani Architects, said “daylight harvesting,” a key advantage of the glass addition, will help to keep the energy use down. Plans also call for glare-reducing, solar-gain-reducing sunscreens “so that when the sun is out, we don’t have to pull the shades and turn the lights on … Basically, you would be able to operate these new spaces without the lights on almost year round.”
Ralph said that the most important thing people will net is chairs.
“”There’s about 30 hard, desk-type seats and maybe about a third of that in soft seats, and more people than that use the library,” said Ralph. “The biggest thing we can provide is space for people to enjoy the things that the library has to offer. We are getting a lot of extra space …
“… As far as additional material goes, we always do a site specific analysis of the collection, so we look at what the collection looks like, how it’s circulating, are there parts of the collection that need to be increased, parts that to be decreased. Overall, the amount of the collection will stay roughly the same in this building, but the areas in the collection might expand or contract, based on Auburn’s usage,” Ralph said.
Johnson said the plan is to put the contract out to bid in July and August of this year and open the bids by mid-August. She said the contractors should need roughly a month to get their contract insurance and bonds together, so construction should begin in the first week of October.
“The reason there’s a little delay there is it takes us about two to four weeks to move things out of the building,” Johnson said.
Asked why the library has to close, Johnson said KCLS’s experiences trying to keep its libraries open during construction have not been good.
“We have had a lot of experience with this and done several of these major renovations and expansions, and there is really no way to operate these buildings when we are doing this kind of major construction. Between cutting off the electricity, cutting off water and cutting off the restrooms it’s really a very unpleasant building. The other side of it is that we want to make sure the contractor can get in here and get the job done and get out as quickly as possible,” Johnson said.
KCLS Director Bill Ptacek said that all the libraries in the area will be available as alternatives.
