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Donald Maurice Kreis
It's not hard to imagine Mark Mitchell as a regular
in the upstairs reading room of the Norman Williams Public Library
in Woodstock. An avuncular fellow with bushy grey eyebrows and a
demeanor that is both friendly and refined, he seems in his element
beneath the wooden arches and stained glass windows - perhaps re-reading
a Jane Austen novel and musing to himself that, although the after-school
hoard of teenagers adds a measure of distraction, it is a good thing
that they, too, are at home in this space.
But Mitchell is no mere user of the library's second
floor spaces - he is their creator. One-hundred fifteen years after
the stately quasi-Romanesque building on the Woodstock Green loaned
its first book, Mitchell's sweeping, $4.5 million renovation of
the library opened this past fall - to no particular notice beyond
the friendly confines of Windsor County's shire town. Mitchell,
it turns out, proudly practices the architecture of invisibility
- a design philosophy that is completely in harmony with his unassuming
physical presence.
"It's not spectacular enough - it's too appropriate,"
Mitchell says, explaining why he expects no awards or recognition
for such a well-crafted and intelligent addition to the region's
store of public spaces dedicated to literary exploration.
To appreciate the caliber of what Mitchell has accomplished
with this project, stop reading right now, head for the Woodstock
Green and plan on finishing this article at the library. (Don't
linger too long at the tripartite arches that form the entryway;
they have been filled in by a clear glass wall that, while successful,
represents a compromise Mitchell made with a client that was willing
to make the renovation visually obvious to this extent, in order
to gain some needed space.) Stand at the threshold of the library's
sanctuary-like interior and try to guess whether anything you see
was not there when the original design by the Wilson Brothers of
Philadelphia was first executed.
In fact, the temple of knowledge first created by
the Wilson firm had no second floor beyond a small balcony directly
above the main entryway. Mitchell's graceful intervention is to
fit a spacious mezzanine above the stacks and the two small wings
at the rear of the building, adorning it with woodwork that is indistinguishable
from that which formed the railing of the original balcony. The
world is full of fine old buildings whose grand, multi-story spaces
have been filled in by latter-day renovators seeking to add space
cheaply. But in this instance, Mitchell correctly intuited that
none of the grandeur of this space would be compromised by such
an infill because the original wooden stacks, which remain, reached
to a uniform height that created the visual equivalent of a balcony
in any event.
Indeed, the stacks actually provide the structural
support for the mezzanine, in keeping with one of Mitchell's chief
precepts in updating this historic building. "I wouldn't do
anything to the building that couldn't be reversed," he explains.
Should some future fervor for historic preservation require the
restoration of this building to its original, 1885 condition, it
could be done.
1885 was an interesting year to open a library. The
exuberant and macho style of Boston's great architect Henry Hobson
Richardson, known as Richardson Romanesque, set the standard for
public library design. That's evident here, in the building's strong
stonework and decisive entry arches. But the Norman Williams Library
is an odd and refreshing variation on the Richardsonian theme. It
is said that the Wilson Brothers thought a visual pun on the library's
name would be appropriate, so they designed a building in the Norman
style. Historians of American architecture don't list "Norman"
as a recognized design fashion as the Queen Anne, Richardsonian
Romanesque and Shingle styles were. Today, what the Wilson Brothers
regarded as Norman reads as a kind of simplicity of line and an
affinity for steeply pitched gables, which give the building an
almost modern look.
An afternoon visit to the second floor reading room
created by Mitchell's removable intervention reveals that teenagers
do indeed congregate there after school, hanging out beneath the
restored stained glass windows featuring a tree of knowledge with
pleasingly complex roots as well as branches. They sit, obliviously,
within reaching distance of the great wooden arches that represent
a refreshing rarity in architecture - the arches remain the real
structural support for the building, at a time when so many buildings
have reduced such devices to mere decoration.
"Here's the reference desk - but no reference
librarian yet," Mitchell muses, pointing to an unoccupied desk
well within sight of the teens. The architect was very concerned
about not locating this desk at the entrance to the library, where
the circulation desk is, calling it a "major violation"
of how a library should be organized. There just wasn't room for
everything at the threshold and Mitchell was somewhat reluctantly
persuaded that it would not be asking too much of readers to seek
reference help in the upstairs reading room. Now the library just
has to find money in the budget to staff the desk.
Meanwhile, Mitchell is hoping that the teens will
discover what he has created in the basement. Once a dark and dismal
storage area rendered useless by a forest of columns holding up
the main floor, the basement is now a bright and highly functional
children's room.
"As the kids grow up with the library and have
it all their lives, they'll have no compunctions about going downstairs
to the kids' room" even after they've hit adolescence, Mitchell
testifies. As a specialist in library design and renovation, he's
seen it happen before. And he is proud of having created what he
calls a "modern space" without controversy, even though
the project was supposed to be and in all other respects is very
much a rehabilitation of a historic building.
Maybe because what happens upstairs is so bedazzling
in its fidelity to the library's original architecture, and possibly
because the sheer act of taking stairs to the basement makes a transition
seem appropriate, Mitchell's architecture of invisibility strikes
again and one is almost tricked into not noticing that the children's
room looks anything but historic. It is all whiteness and lightness.
The west wall is lined with staff offices that sport windows that
admit plenty of employee-nurturing natural light even though the
rooms are well below grade. The east wall sports a generous row
of windows, opening onto a terrace that was created through extensive
excavation and regrading of the landscape adjoining that facade.
In this welcoming space will many lifelong reading habits most certainly
be nurtured.
Typically, a library project and, indeed, almost any
other new or newly renovated public structure embraces a different
architecture of invisibility of a type that Mitchell and his client
have here consciously, completely and laudably avoided. Budget imperatives,
and the desire to create public spaces that are pleasant if not
dazzling, typically force architects to consign workers to unpleasant
warrens even though it is the employees who inevitably spend the
most time in the building. The new Berry Library at Dartmouth is
a notorious example; whole floors of workers there are expected
to spend their entire work lives in windowless subterranean oblivion.
At the Woodstock library, the successful offices adjacent
to the children's room comprise only one example of how well the
library staff has fared in Woodstock. Upstairs, a cozy director's
office is nestled beneath the eaves of the northwestern gable and
well lit by skylight windows that have been judiciously cut into
a part of the roof that faces away from the street. Its companion
space on the other side of the building is the library's new Vermont
Room, housing rare books and historical materials. Between these
two spaces is a work room that comprises the only space that even
begins to seem unpleasantly attic-like. But even this room has a
small window and, intriguingly, a computer nook that allows one
to peer thorough a flower-shaped window into the main room of the
library in much the same way a movie projectionist can spy discreetly
on theatergoers.
The flower-shaped window - identical to the pattern
on the mezzanine railings - exists because this opening is expressed
on the reading room side as one of the building's original doors,
seemingly pasted in misbegotten fashion on the space's north wall.
"It was a decision that got away from me," Mitchell confesses.
Little else got away from Mitchell, although the project's
budget was something that defied containment. The architect's original
estimate was $2.2 million - less than half the ultimate pricetag.
Fully $1 million of that was eaten up by an unforseen need to rebuild
fully a fifth of the library's masonry walls. Every historic rehabilitation
project is something of an exercise in budgetary hubris; one never
truly knows the exact condition of the building until construction
begins and walls are opened up to reveal unseen structural innards.
In this instance, the walls were opened up and sand began pouring
out, a result of water-induced degradation.
"This was a job where anything that could go
wrong, did," muses Mitchell. At his behest, experts actually
opened up one wall prior to construction to check the condition
of the masonry from the inside. Unbeknownst to all, this wall had
been previously repaired.
That the trustees of the Norman Williams Library persevered
through this, and other cost overruns, is a testament to their fortitude
and their insulation from the vicissitudes of public financing.
Every cent of the $4.5 million was privately raised, a point that
the library's acting director, Debbie Bullock Spackman, is very
quick to point out.
Defensiveness is unnecessary in such circumstances.
The trustees, their donors and the citizens of Woodstock have received
something truly worthy of such a sizeable investment: a library
that was able to triple its useable floor space while only slightly
increasing the library's footprint (through the addition of an inconspicuous
stair tower at the rear), and a public building that is fully accessible
(thanks to a new elevator that is both inconspicuous and centrally
located). Most importantly, at a time when too much great new architecture
is confined to private property, this renovation celebrates the
notion that the public deserves great spaces. One can only hope
that some of this spirit rubs off on the Windsor County Courthouse
right next door, a historic structure that is every bit as worthy
of similar attention but lacks private benefactors.
Hug the Norman Williams Library - or at least touch
it. Surface after surface - the red ashlar masonry of the exterior,
the polished marble that forms the remarkable walls adjoining the
first floor stacks, the meticulously restored, eye-level cushion
capitals that support the entrance arches - seems to invite physical
contact. Too many libraries built today make no pretense of offering
such sensory pleasures; they are mere conduits, designed to get
users to their computer terminals (and occasionally to the books)
as efficiently as possible. Here is a place to daydream as well
as to read, a welcome throwback to an era when learning was not
just a way to compete successfully in the global economy.
It isn't necessary to hug Mark Mitchell, but at least
thank him for his architecture of invisibility. As many a lavish
and too-conspicuous building project on well-endowed campuses demonstrates,
it is a rare architect who can make $4.5 million disappear this
successfully.
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