Silver Spring Library-Early Days

Aerial view of the pre-existing site. Fenton Avenue is toward the bottom, across the photo. Wayne Avenue is on the right, with the Wayne Ave Garage just opposite the library site. The Crescent, high rise condo, just north of the site would become the library’s closest neighbor. Photo furnished by Montgomery County, MD

The story began rather casually. My partner received the phone call from a senior staffer with Montgomery County DGS asking if we could participate in a round of town meetings discussing the County’s plans for the new Silver Spring Library. Don Scheuerman asked if we would mind working in tandem with the large Baltimore firm, RTKL, who Montgomery County had used for other major public projects. RTKL urban designers would be MC’ing the meetings.

To explain, the Lukmire Partnership was already under a three-year contract for design and construction for County library projects in what’s termed an ‘open end’ contract. We and our chief competitors in the library market, Grimm & Parker held open contracts. Olney Library was the first project under our contract and was soon to begin construction. To explain further, our firm was dwarfed in size by RTKL, the difference being we held the library contract. Since then RTKL has become a division of an even larger entity, Arcadis, and TLP was absorbed by another firm. Thus is life.

As much as the Olney project was an interesting design problem, the Silver Spring Library looked to be an order of magnitude more challenging.

The County had assembled a site at the edge of downtown Silver Spring from eight smaller parcels with the goal of finding a new home replacing the old 50s library and land for ‘affordable’ housing–something of an oxymoron in Montgomery County as it is across the greater Washington area. All this on a combined area of one and a quarter acres.

Oh—almost forgot—the Maryland Transportation Authority (MDTA) had previously determined the site was to have the future alignment of the Purple Line sweep in a grand diagonal across the site. The Purple Line was a light rail transit system yet to be fully funded, though the alignment (‘route’ in engineering speak) had been chosen. The engineers needed to shift the line as it approached the Silver Spring Metro station from Wayne Avenue to Bonifant Street, one block over. Lucky us, we got to figure how it would all fit.

The site across the street, a poorly used church, would have been ideal to serve the engineers’ purpose, and would have made our work 100% less difficult. To be expected, once the library was opened for business, developers tore down the church for a mixed-use commercial / housing development.

The consolidated library property was adequately zoned for a high rise development, however it sat adjacent to a lower density neighborhood called Fenton Village (named after Fenton Street bordering the site), so we needed to find a way not to overwhelm that two and three story residential area. And deal with the at-grade transit line carving the site into two unequal parts.

What started with a phone call took eight years to complete.

The initial public meetings–six in all, as I recall–were interesting. The citizens of Silver Spring were interesting–vocally so. Community meetings where design decisions are made in view of the public can be tricky. Often, you get a handful of folks ‘speaking for the community’ and the rest sitting on their hands. But not in Silver Spring. All the meetings were well attended, and all attendees held opinions. Little ‘d’ democracy in action.

Rod Henderer, AIA, the RTKL lead architect, was master of ceremonies, and by the end of the first meeting we learned the citizenry’s general suspicion the County wasn’t ‘thinking big enough,’ even though the actual library program had yet to be figured. The County library staff had developed an earlier ‘program of requirements.’ We started with that document, and worked with the staff to update the collection numbers and introduce the concept of library as a collaboration space for children, teens and adults. At the same time, we were asking for the community’s input. Living in the free state of Montgomery County, the community didn’t hold back.

One local woman was particularly vocal about how in heavens the disabled could navigate a high rise library? She needed answers! She wore an eyeglass worthy of a scientist on her one good eye so she could read the images close up. She intended to be heard from and wasn’t too concerned about anyone who thought that was weird. It was only weird to me she had the guts to stand in front of so many others and demand her right to participate. Would I have her gumption in the same circumstance?

The resulting 63,000 square foot library was as large a library as the County had built. On top of which, Ike Leggett, the County Exec, wanted us to plan for Health and Human Services office space, and a not-for-profit art institute space, 100,000 square feet all totaled.

Recall that in 2007-2008 the country was going into meltdown along with Lehman Brothers and their buddies. Leggett was betting against the bank that he could keep building. A gutsy call. He was going for a moon shot.

Early Concepts 

While the building programs were being developed with staff, we and RTKL began studying site permutations for the project–as in literally every single one. Should the library front on Wayne Avenue, or take a more comfortable position at the fatter east end of the site against Bonifant Street?

The latter was the easier answer, in that the library could be made fat and happy on two floors instead of three. Something about that bothered me but I kept my mouth shut for a change; this was supposed to be a decision made by the community.

Should there be a park on Wayne Avenue for relief from the ugly garage across the street and for the condo owners just next door? Should an urban space between the library and the condo be created? Between RTKL and ourselves, I believe we were honest brokers, creating as many options as were available.

I developed an enormous spread sheet, listing all criteria we’d heard were important and testing all six options. In the next public meeting we weighted each criterion against the next, then scored each option against each criterion. In public. Lot’s of people, lots of nervous County staff. Some of the staff worried it would get out of hand, but here’s why it worked: remarkably, everyone was working toward the best facility they could get, and the discussions were as detailed as they were thoughtful.

The site options and building program were presented in the last several town meetings. Reduced to six, and brought down to one.

Block diagram image by RTKL, © 2009

Option 1c was the winning contestant. The sketch is what’s known as a block diagram. The residential block is shown in yellow facing a small future park. The Purple Line is shown (in purple) as it runs across the site. The library’s largest floor plates building needed to span across the top of the future transit station. This last point raised all sorts of valid concern among the librarians that no large downtown library had ever been positioned three stories above the street. True that.

Add to that, we were telling the librarians it would need to be on 3 separate floors. Every floor means more fulltime staff to manage it–and more questions from patrons looking for their favorite mystery and romance novels “But just think, you’ll be the first library in the country to be a transit station, ah, er, I mean the station will be part of the library.” Oh crap.

Back when I was with Harry Weese designing Metro stations, our rule was to ensure a development could be built on top of the station or around it, so that the station was subsumed into the heart of the city. Here we were going to build a library & arts center before the station was even funded. My hat went off to the senior County leaders for the guts of doing it, and I worked hard to allay the librarians’ worries. If I knew anything, it was how transit stations worked.

Parking as an Urban Pain

This was a truly urban site.  Accepting the inevitable need for parking, the County had already invested in several downtown parking structures as part of Silver Spring’s renewal.  The Wayne Ave. Garage was the closest of these, and County staff intended for the Library’s parking compliment to be there.  We already knew if the library were to take up a position on Wayne Avenue, the large floor plates library floors wouldn’t fit at street level.  Given the clearances needed for the transit cars, the first floor of the library needed to be at the 3rd floor level.  So it seemed logical to yours truly that a pedestrian bridge spanning Wayne Avenue would bring patrons arriving by car directly into the library.  You’d have thought I shot the Pope to hear the planners. 

There’s a sacred cow among urban planners that separating pedestrians from the street kills life on the street.  But if your parking is across a six-lane arterial, is it really a good idea to have patrons descend to grade, sprint the street to arrive at an entrance three floors below the library?  It’s a problem of one size fits all thinking.  The fourth floor of the garage aligned within inches of the library’s third floor.  Come on, apply some logic people!  You want the disabled to travel three times as far for a sacred cow?  We had some great ideas of how the bridge would look, but we lost that fight at the County Council, sad to say. 

One of the criteria the citizens felt important was a library entrance from Fenton Street–as well as the entrance needed on Wayne Avenue for those coming from the garage across the street.  Far as I was concerned, the more entrances into the library, the better encouragement for patrons.  A Fenton Street entrance also offered pedestrians a way to bypass crossing the at-grade transit tracks. 

Design Team

Somewhere early in the process, I picked up a helpmate. Lean-looking earnest fellow a couple years out of the University of Maryland. I hadn’t been involved in his hiring, so this would be starting from scratch to build a relationship. No idea what his skills were–nor did he have any idea who his boss would be. Brian Essig was without question one of the biggest success stories on the project. We became a two man design crew–he did the drawing, and I drove him crazy.

When I realized Brian was the same age as my son, Ryan, it was hard at first to put it out of my mind. In his early twenties, this would be Ryan. I’m sure some of that filtered through our relationship. Certainly, I was proud to see how fast Brian developed, and the credit was his.

Randy Haist was a principal reason we pulled off the final design of the library. He’s a soft-spoken structural engineer–a principal in Columbia Engineering (the same firm worked on the Olney Library). You need people like this when building your Ark. Trini Rodriguez of Parker Rodriguez delivered on the landscape architect. And once the design had been finalized, my partner, Robin Puttock, herded all the team’s cats; she’s now’s teaching architecture at Catholic University.

We also had another woman on the team who kept pushing, advocating, and swearing she would quit yet saw it to completion. More than once I told her if she left, I was as well. Later walking through the completed building, Susanne Churchill would just smile and nod. You can’t build well without a client who’s willing to fight for it. I owed her my sanity; I owe her a lot.

Early Design Concepts

In the spring of 2009, we were still in the public eye. It wouldn’t stop until we had a real design to show. Mostly, we ourselves needed to understand how this 25 pound baby was gonna fit in its 5 pound bassinet. Drop her in!

We were on a tight schedule. The public meetings, once announced, needed to go forward. Reports were going regularly to the County Exec Ike Leggett. Soon, his right hand man, David Dise, in charge of DGS became involved. We studied options, debated them internally, then with the County staff, tweaked them based on feedback, dropped a few, added a few more, changing directions, then adjusted them more, all before going public.

So the earliest 3D work was mostly about scale and less about intended final design. For the truly bored among you, the options are here, fresh as the day the PowerPoint show was born. Silver Spring Library Early Concepts gives an idea of what we were doing in the spring of 2009. And for the rest, skip on by, only remember a lot of genius work went into these.

Image by the Lukmire Partnership, © 2009

Later, Brian began using Sketchup for improved speed; AutoCAD’s programs were kludgy when it came to 3D renderings. Some of the background files were AutoCAD imported into Sketchup. Then he introduced a genuine gift–Kerkythea, a freeware application that could turn the Sketchup model into a dream. Lest you think it’s not true, watch this space next week.

A key problem we kept wrestling was what to do at the Wayne Avenue/Fenton Street intersection where the transit tracks will one day run (once the Purple Line is completed) literally across the corner of the site, arrogantly jaywalking. We needed that corner overhead on the library floors! Drop some columns like the Whitehurst Freeway in Georgetown or the Chicago L and call it a day? Very lame.

It was asking, begging really, to be a prow, but how? And what to make of that diagonal slicing the site? Jim Stirling and Charlie Moore had taught me not to overlook existing conditions–they were opportunities. But what were we to do with an abstract purple line?

Next week, I hope to take a dive into the final design work–then perhaps the following week the final product.  Too many photos for a single blog. But here’s where we ended up:

Image by the Lukmire Partnership, © 2009