I finally got the chance to visit the new downtown Calgary library. If you haven’t seen it yet I highly recommend it, even if you don’t consider yourself a library person. For starters, it is an architectural tour de force. It has great street presence, enormous and monumental and yet still friendly and inviting. Inside the front doors it is spectacular with a vast central area ringed by beautiful staircases. It is high concept architecture of the type you see in glossy magazines but still functional and friendly to humans.
If you don’t care about architecture as an art form, remember that these kinds of buildings can transform neighborhoods. The Bilbao effect, named after the Spanish city that reinvigorated its economy with a single museum, has been overhyped at times but it is true that architecture can make a huge difference to a community. The new Calgary library is built in the East Village that used to be little more than a scary place to park. Now the library and other redevelopment have made it the trendiest new neighbourhood in Calgary.
None of that is immediately relevant to Medicine Hat, which is not getting a new library any time soon, but Calgary’s project can teach other lessons. Most impressively, the new library is an absolute success with citizens. It is packed with people, all kinds of people doing all kinds of things, and it is well designed enough to absorb all these people comfortably. It is open but as you move through it, the spaces feel intimate and human scaled. There are cozy nooks off the passageways between larger areas, and different levels to differentiate spaces. It works really well, and it proves that libraries at their best are relevant and valuable, desired and used.
I was interested to see the services they are offering (that’s the library nerd coming out in me). People were lined up to try virtual reality goggles, which made me happy because, hmm, well, maybe something like that is coming soon to our little library. (Sorry Marketing for spilling the beans!) They have gone all out with public meeting rooms which again makes me feel good that we offer the same — although they have slick little touch screen displays on their rooms which show reservations and allow users to unlock the doors. We will have to live with a paper printout and a staff key for the foreseeable future.
For me the most immediate lesson was about furnishings. There are of course many different kinds of seating, work spaces and other furnishings in such a large facility but everything fit together and a unified design was apparent. We are about to replace some worn and soiled furniture — some of our chairs are an embarrassment and we can’t wait to get rid of them — but I realize now that we have to avoid acquiring a hodgepodge of different furnishings. We need a plan and we are going to develop one quickly.
Ken Feser is chief librarian at the Medicine Hat Public Library.
