October 30, 2017

KCLS expands library in Southcenter mall

Photos by Lara Swimmer Photography [enlarge]

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King County Library System has remodeled and expanded its library at Westfield Southcenter in Tukwila.

The architect was BuildingWork. Principal Matt Aalfs said the original 2,300-square-foot library had outgrown a deep and narrow L-shaped space that limited its visibility.

So 2,000 square feet of adjacent space at a prominent corner in the mall was added, and the original space was remodeled.

The team included Allen-Bradbury Construction, general contractor; Swenson Say Faget, structural engineer; dark | light design, lighting design; The Greenbusch Group, mechanical engineer; and Travis, Fitzmaurice & Associates, electrical engineer.

The project cost $820,000.

To meet the tight construction budget, existing interior finishes were removed and overhead infrastructure was exposed and painted white. Also, light fixtures and shelving were salvaged, re-lamped with LEDs, repositioned and re-used.

In a press release, Aalfs said the new storefront facade was designed to have a strong and inviting presence from the outside, while the inside offers a quiet refuge from the busy mall.

The library facade is composed of opaque, translucent and transparent materials, including a colored resin panel material from the aircraft industry manufactured by Lumicor in Tukwila.

Patron services extend into the shopping mall corridor, with windows for librarian-curated displays and a touch-screen interface for ordering books that is integrated into the storefront facade.

The library also has public access computers, free wifi and device charging stations.

Aalfs said the library system operates a number of branches such as this in regional shopping malls, as they are heavily used, with circulation and visit counts among the highest in the system of 50 branch libraries.