Reading Rooms for Modernists

Open plans, cool details and gardens turn mid-century libraries into real attractions
By Dave Weinstein
CA-Modern Insider
The former main South San Francisco Public Library (pictured above from 2008) has retained most of its look from the exterior, although a metal grill that once fronted the wall of windows has been removed (and portions of the grill turned into a sculpture in a nearby park). Photo: BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes a longtime public servant needs a little appreciation, a little love.

Cheryl Grantana Rich, who began working at the South San Francisco Public Library on West Orange Avenue in 1969, three years after its opening, feels that way about her former workplace, which served the people of this Peninsula town since 1958 and is today facing a transition.

"It was my whole career," says Cheryl, who lived nearby in a Foster City Eichler and retired after 45 years as assistant library director. "I was a kid when I started. I hadn't even been to library school yet."

 

CA-Modern Insider
Inside, most of the South San Francisco Library, as this vintage photo shows, was made up of a large, single space, divided by shelving and pleasant areas for seating and reading. Photo: courtesy South San Francisco Library

Valerie Sommer, today's library director, shares Cheryl's enthusiasm, which, she says, represents the opinion of most library patrons.

"It's a beautiful building. People love it," Valerie says of the building, which was designed by the architectural firm Markling and Yamasaki. "It's a comfortable building, and everything is on one floor. There were nice seating areas and plenty of books. The high ceiling makes it feel very spacious."

Starting in the 1930s—with roots going back a few decades—the idea of what a library is began to change—as did ideas of what a home should be. The modernism that most owners of houses built by Joe Eichler appreciate in their homes can also be appreciated in mid-century modern buildings of all sorts.

 

CA-Modern Insider
UCLA's Charles E. Young Research Library was designed by architects Jones & Emmons, who also designed homes for Joe Eichler. The library opened in 1964. Photo: Adam Fagen

The libraries in our communities, generally easier to visit than churches or commercial buildings or schools, really show off how the same principles used by Eichler's architects—openness, the blend of indoors and outdoors, simplicity, and smooth style—can be appreciated in a public setting.

As Danish sociologist and historian of libraries, Nan Dahlkid wrote in 2011, after World War II "there was a movement toward library environments that were 'light, spacious, and informal.' Library space became even more open and transparent, with glass walls and minimalistic interior design."

 

CA-Modern Insider
The Rinconada branch of the Palo Alto Public Library is a comforting ranch-like structure that emphasizes its attachment to the landscape. Architect Edward Durrell Stone's characteristic use of perforated concrete blocks creates a screen surrounding a building that has walls of glass. Photo: Dave Weinstein

Dahlkid traced the roots of the modern library to such projects as Alvar Aalto's library in Vibord, Finland, from 1935; and Denmark's Nyborg Public Library of 1939, whose "unpretentious and modest red-brick buildings in a garden setting, with canals, lawns, and groups of trees…became an example of a new type of library architecture, where easy access, freedom of movement, spacious rooms, and the use of light wooden furniture were expressions of democratization and public enlightenment."

In the United States, a number of well-known modernists designed libraries, including the Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, who gave Grosse Point, Michigan, a red-bricked library in 1953; Frank Lloyd Wright, who included a library branch in the Marin County Civic Center in 1960; and Louis Kahn, who designed the Hewlett Building, with its Graduate Theological Library, in Berkeley in 1972.