SAN DIEGO STATE TO REMODEL LIBRARY OVER 15-20 YEAR PERIOD: COST $100 MILLION

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By Jake Christie

December 29, 2013 (San Diego)--As a courtesy to the thousands of San Diego State University students who use Malcolm A. Love Library, the library administration recently held an open house of sorts to describe their plans for modernizing the Nixon-era structure-- plans that may take 20 years to finish and cost somewhere in the ballpark of $100 million. 

The presentation was held in the Leon Williams Room (fourth floor, Love Library) to an audience of 19 students and made by Stephanie Kingsnorth, an architect with Pfeiffer Partners Architects of Los Angeles.

According to Kingsnorth, there just isn’t enough space in the library for studying students and  because the internal layout hasn’t changed much since the building opened in 1972, it suffers from an “incoherent design.” What she proposed was no radical change, just a new strategic space plan for each floor where the book stacks are pushed closer to the interior, thus opening up more space closer to the slit windows. 

The other trick would be digitization of the books so that fewer shelves would be in the library because the building is mainly used by students as a study space.  ECM reporter Jake Christie has, in the past, seen students sitting on the carpeted area around the elevators and central staircase eating or studying because there are no available chairs.

The other changes to be implemented will be a re-alignment of the Clinton-era dome so that students enter the building on ground level with the original library and the ground level outside will be glassed in to restore the original corner stairwells, which are currently only  emergency exits. All the wooden paneling in the library will go, replaced with glass, as will the original elevators. Art will return to the library, as will the special collections. 

The area behind the building (which faces the ampetheater) will be refurbished for a possible meeting/donor party area and the rear door on the second floor will be sealed off. All of these changes and more will be broken up into 30 non-sequential “packages” of work to be done whenever San Diego State deigns to give Love Library the money.

At no time will the work be extensive enough that the library will be closed down entirely, and the hope is to gain 500 additional seats for students and thus reach the 20 percent level of seat-age required by California State University guidelines. 

According to Dean of the Library Gale Etschmaier, they have a fund of $500,000 to do some of the work now. Stephanie Kingsnorth repeatedly called her plan for the building “The Library of the Future.”


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