• Posted: April 15, 2019
• better construction, Harper Junior College

 

When Harper College Library reopened to students in 2018, it was immediately clear that this space would be different than all others on campus.

“Harper College suggested thinking of the library as a ‘third place’ instead of just another building,” said Jeff Sronkoski, Director of Higher Education at Legat Architects.

If your first place is home and second place is school, Harper College administrators wanted the updated library to be the ‘third place’ that its students would be spending time. This meant that Sronkoski and his team had to take a step back and completely reimagine the idea of what a library can look like and function as.

“It gives you pause as you’re designing the building to think about “are these decisions consistent with the ‘third place’ goal that we’re trying to incorporate into the building?”” said Scott Steingraeber, project manager at Legat.

This meant reimagining the library to be more open and inviting to students; a place where talking and interacting is encouraged, and ‘shushing’ is thrown out the window. So, when Legat took the building down to the studs and started from the ground up, the emphasis was put on giving students a collaborative, small group learning experience throughout the library.

“’Third place’ affected the furnishings as well,” Steingraeber explained. “We wanted to use things that students would find comfortable and appealing. This went all the way down to the shape of the seating and the fabrics. The goal was all about making the students as comfortable as possible.”

In addition to opening up the space and making it more comfortable to students, Legat added 3,500 square feet to the building without doing a build-out. To accomplish this feat, Legat removed the shadowbox effect the building originally had and took use of that space by pushing the panes of glass out and adding more useable interior space.

“Since we had to replace the glass anyway, this was just an additional benefit for the college,” Sronkoski said.

The library also hosts an array of interesting electrical techniques. It is the first entirely LED building on Harper’s campus and has set the foundation to push the college to all-LED in future renovations. The building has daylight harvesting and sensors in each room to control the amount of light let off by overhead fixtures.

This means that if the shades are up and sunlight is sufficiently lighting the room, the overhead lights will dim to save on electricity.

LEED certification is still being worked out, but with all that’s in place, Legat expects the building to be certified as Silver.

To learn more about Legat’s work on Harper College’s Library, please click here.