Design of Branch Libraries Adds Pages to City’s History

During 10 years as city librarian, Bill Sannwald has quietly helped the city build a small architectural legacy in the form of its branch libraries. As director of the San Diego city library system, he has worked on the remodeling or construction of 11 branches, and designs for five new branches look promising.

Architects who have worked with Sannwald uniformly praise his open-minded attitude towards design. They say he hires good architects and trusts their judgment, admirable behavior in a client.

In an age when so many diversions compete for the public’s attention, Sannwald realizes that distinctive libraries may be the best advertisement of all for books and reading. He has helped elevate libraries to admirable neighborhood symbols in many San Diego neighborhoods.

“He’s really got a lot of drive. He’s given us free reign,” said architect Wally Gordon of Bradshaw/Bundy & Thompson, designers of the Otay Mesa branch, completed in 1986. It won an Honor Award, the highest recognition, from the local American Institute of Architects chapter last year.

“He understands architecture,” added architect Manuel Oncina, who’s designing a new branch for Pacific Beach. “Some of the buildings he’s initiated are very nice. San Diego is sort of conservative, and architects have a hard time getting interesting buildings built, but he has initiated a program that has tapped some of the more controversial or avant garde-types.”

Among them is architect Rob Quigley, whose Linda Vista branch library design has given the heart of a low- and middle-income community an optimistic new focus. Not only did the branch receive a Merit Award from the local AIA chapter in 1988, but it was one of a very few San Diego projects published in recent years in the national trade journal Progressive Architecture.

The difference between Quigley’s design and the Otay Mesa project illustrates the broad-mindedness of the library’s construction program under Sannwald.

Linda Vista’s new branch is unashamedly avant garde, an aggressive, angular building of unusual materials. Two large metal frames fly from one end of the building to support a perforated metal screen (missing due to a windstorm), designed to filter light before it passes through a large bank of windows into the building.

Sannwald especially likes the interior, where a ramp rises gradually through the stacks towards a reading area, a children’s reading room features windows at a height only children can appreciate, and wood beams sprout like branches from round, trunk-like concrete columns to support the roof.

The Otay Mesa branch is unusual in a different way. Its sawtooth forms serve both as a strong visual presence and a practical way to bring in natural light while preserving privacy. Glass panels on the back sides of these teeth face north; the roof is a light color to help bounce light inside.

Aisles radiate from a round circulation desk, giving librarians clear view between the stacks, a key to good security. Sawtooth forms used on the street side of the building make it a visual magnet compared with the mundane condominiums and shopping center nearby.

From the start of his career, Sannwald seemed destined to influence the architecture of libraries.

“The first job I had out of library school was building a library in Libertyville, Ill.,” he said. He has chaired the Architecture for Public Libraries Committee for the American Library Assn. and spent five years as a pipe fitter.

As city librarian, his involvement with architecture ranges from having a prominent voice in the city’s selection of architects to working with community groups to determine what sort of building residents want.

Sannwald has helped the library system develop a 70-page “program” for a standard 10,000-square-foot branch, which tells architects much of what they need to know to begin design work.

Additional information comes from the community. On some projects, the architects find themselves working within narrow tastes. Many communities want to stick with the status quo; they want buildings which blend in rather than stand out.

In La Jolla, for example, community planning group members requested a building that would fit in with the existing neighborhood in both appearance and scale. The resulting new branch, designed by architect Roy Drew and opened last year, isn’t as striking as some of the more progressive branches.

For residents of Scripps Ranch, Gordon and his associates from Bradshaw/Bundy & Thompson recently completed design work on a mission revival building, based on community sentiment toward the 19th-Century Meanley ranch house, an important piece of local history. A clay tile roof, walls of light-colored stucco and arched arcades are in keeping with this style.

Rancho Penasquitos wants a Spanish-inspired branch, so architect Gene Cipparone of CLEO Architecture worked with what he calls modified mission style: smooth stucco walls with deep-set windows, a flat roof instead of clay tile. Cipparone hopes to use a dark rose sandstone color on the exterior to set the branch apart from the light-colored shopping center buildings next door.

The Rancho Penasquitos and Scripps Ranch libraries are among five branches up for state construction funding this year, Sannwald said. Other communities hoping for new libraries are Point Loma, North City West and Pacific Beach.

Pacific Beach’s branch, designed by Oncina for the site of Farnum Elementary School, could be one of the city’s most interesting. The school buildings will be replaced with a branch library in a park setting.

The design might be described as modern Mediterranean with organic overtones. The roof of the half-round main building fans out from a central tower, like petals of a flower. At ground level, the different sides of the building will have simple, forceful geometries. A wedge-shaped public plaza will link the building with the park.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from Sannwald, it is that good architects are both artists and capable professionals.

Instead of hiring a bunch of “yes” men and women, clients in both the private and public sector could get more interesting, functional buildings by turning such original thinkers loose on their projects.

Hiring first-rate architects instead of “design-build” contractors is the only way corporate clients like the Radisson and Ramada hotel chains will improve on the mediocre architecture they’ve recently foisted on downtown San Diego.

As for Sannwald, his greatest challenge might be just ahead. He expects San Diegans to vote next fall on a proposed bond issue for a new 375,000-square-foot downtown main library. This would replace the existing 144,000-square-foot building that Sannwald acknowledged as the city’s “biggest . . . and ugliest.”