Quincy reveals library plans for new 9,700 square-foot building

QUINCY — The Quincy City Council saw the designs and approved a contract for the city’s new library Tuesday.

The city will pay MJ Neal Associates $210,000 to design, bid and construct the library.

The about 3,500 square-foot building was constructed in 1960. The new building would be about 9,700 square feet, allowing more room for books, seating and computers, said project architect Brad Brisbine. The city purchased land on the corner of C Street and Central Avenue to build the library.

“It was a design process where we looked at the broad-brush issues first, then went towards the detail. I worked very closely with a group of about eight individuals on the library board to come up with this,” he said. “They acted as your representatives for the community.”

The building will sit close to the intersection with a parking lot behind it. Brisbine said there were two reasons for this. The first is a city ordinance requiring a 100-foot space between the intersection and a parking lot entrance. The other reason is a U.S. Department of the Interior program advocating locating buildings closer to the sidewalk.

“The reason they do that is because it enhances the pedestrian atmosphere, and so you’re right here by the building entrances and the store front as opposed to looking across a sea of cars to see the building,” he said.

Also the parking lot behind the building allows the city to purchase the residences next to it for future expansion, he said.

In the rear of the building, there will be rest rooms and a meeting room, which can be sealed off from the library in case people want to use it after hours, Brisbine said. The meeting room would be able to seat about 50 people.

“That could be used in the evenings for the community as well as other programs. If an author wanted to come for a book club or something and speak, he could do it in that room, as well as the children could set up table and chairs in there and do art projects,” he said.

Along with the meeting room, Brisbine said they kept the spaces next to the streets open for the daylight.

“We put the children, the teenagers and the reading areas against the window walls,” he said.

The two reading areas will be connected by a double-sided fire place. One of the areas will be a greenhouse-style structure. Brisbine said they plan to use a material composed of two pieces of fiberglass with spun glass between.

“So you don’t look up an see airplanes and clouds, but you do admit a lot of light. It’s only 20 percent light transmittance. Now that doesn’t sound like very much, but on the other hand when you’ve been in a room that has this, it does deliver a lot of light,” he said.

Councilmember Tony Gonzalez asked how the material used for the greenhouse-style reading room would perform during the winter.

“It insulates much better than double pane glass. First of all, you can kind of see that by the fact that it’s thicker. There’s also not air in there. The idea to make an insulating material is to trap air into small spaces and that’s what the angel hair does,” Brisbine said.

Regular glass would make the room too hot in the summer, Brisbine said. The same material would be used above the meeting room.

Brisbine said the outside of the building was designed in a historical form, with a combination of flat roofs and pitched roofs.

“There was a fair amount of discussion within our group about the appropriate style for this building, and, of course, there was a fair number of people on the board that indicated a preference for an agricultural-based design or a historical design, rather than some brand-new modern building that doesn’t look like it fits in this community,” he said.

The 17,600 books and DVDs in the library presently are expected to increase by another 5,000 in the next five years, Brisbine said. The library told the firm its departments needed to expand by about 30 percent in general.

While the city has about $1 million budgeted for the library, the Community Development Block Grant the city applied for was rejected a second time, Councilmember Rebecca Young said.

“The Quincy Valley Library Foundation is working pretty hard, and they have another meeting … to try and get some fund-raising for the library,” she said.

There will also be an event on the site of the new library on July 8 where people can see the plans for the library.