Educating a Community

Director LaWanda Roudebush and her colleagues from Davenport PL, IA, had a location, an architectural style, and an interior design all preselected for their second branch, a 26,000 square foot facility, when they walked into the breakout session at LJ's Design Institute. What they needed was knowledge of green design.

Roudebush told the group, which consisted of about a dozen people, along with Jack Poling, Sean Wagner, and Traci Lesneski of Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle (MS&R) Architects, “We think it should be a LEED building, since the city police station is LEED. We want to be as energy efficient as possible.” She thought that “geothermal would be a good investment” but needed to know more about it. She worried that she couldn't afford the initial costs to obtain LEED certification and wanted to figure out the potential savings over the next ten or 20 years. She was interested in a green roof (the police station has one) but concerned about increased structural costs. Some of her questions had been addressed in the panels at the Design Institute, but others persisted into the breakout session.

The building, as Roudebush described it, sounded as if it might be ideal for sustainable design. It would be part of a new development in a so far undeveloped area of the city, which has a total population of about 100,000, and would sit in an urban parkland, amidst homes built in the compact, walkable, “new urbanist” style. There would be playing fields, pedestrian and bicycle paths, and, ultimately, a school.

To go green, however, many challenges existed. First was the building plan itself, which would mirror the design of the first permanent branch, Fairmount, opened in January 2006. That building is neither LEED certified nor designed to be energy-efficient. As MS&R's Poling pointed out, “You need to be involved with LEED from the beginning.” If Davenport stuck with the original model, that wouldn't be possible. “You need a different design for a different building,” both externally and internally, Poling said.

The “new urbanist” style posed other problems. Because the library mimicked the homes, it would blend into the neighborhood instead of proclaiming itself a civic building. “The building will outlive generations of architectural styles,” Wagner told the group. “It has to stand out.”

The architects urged the group to think of design as a narrative solution and to develop “big conceptual ideas,” e.g., “How can the design of my library positively impact climate change?” Green solutions to consider, said Wagner, include the nature of the materials used both in construction and interiors. “We spend over 80 percent of our time in buildings; we want them to be healthy.”

Also crucial, the architects said, are harvesting rain water (for such things as toilet flushing) and harvesting light by moving things away from the windows. “Move mechanicals to the interior of the building,” Wagner said. “Eliminate the reference desk and the returns desk—they're baggage we keep carrying with us” from building to building. By doing so, the library would use space more efficiently, so the building will have a smaller footprint and use less energy.

Wagner also suggested setting a budget for energy consumption, for instance, “this building will be 58 percent better than the existing branch.”

By the time the breakout session wrapped up, Roudebush had an epiphany: “I was seeing this as a building project. Now I see it as a community project.”

When she returned home, several of those who'd accompanied her—Darrin Nordahl, manager of the design center for the city, Greg Albansoder, city project manager, and Tom Leabhart, an engineer with the city public works department—went back to their departments and reported that “libraries are on the cutting edge” of green design. After additional research, the library board decided to seek LEED certification. They dropped the new urbanist style. “It will be complementary,” said Roudebush, “but people will know it's a community building.”

With a supportive city manager and a new mayor on board, the project has been fast-tracked; the branch is now scheduled to open in November 2009. Roudebush received RFQ's (requests for qualification) from 14 architectural firms by the April 21 submission deadline and hoped to select one by the end of May.

She also applied for a $1.2 million state community attraction and tourism grant to cover the cost of gaining LEED certification, as well as the increased cost of construction. (Since the first branch opened, building costs have risen from $6.8 million to $8.2 million.)

It should be worth it. “We have an opportunity to educate our public about climate control and sustainability,” she said. The library will put videos about the project on its web site, showing aspects of green building such as geothermal heating and cooling, recyclable furniture and carpeting, and permeable paving.