Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Source:  Fairfax County, VA

Consider the following proposal.  Instead of installing regular overhead streetlights, I proposed to light the road and adjacent sidewalk with spotlights, aimed directly into the eyes of oncoming drivers. Continue reading Post #1594: Dysfunctional acorn lights. Maybe it’s time to start getting rid of them.

 

Just tracking the progress on this.  It’s not as if the powers-that-be are ever going to ask any library users what they’d like to see.  So this is just an attempt to keep track of how far this has moved from the original objectionable design.

---

Recall that the Town of Vienna has gone in with Fairfax Count to replace the existing Patrick Henry Library with combination parking garage and library.  I last looked in on this issue in September 2021, in Post #1263.

The original design proposal was pretty awful, with a one-floor library squatting under one half of a three-floor parking garage, with minimal window area, what has to be a dark interior, and no green space to speak of.

 

Basically, look at any of the light, airy, award-winning libraries that Fairfax County has built.

Source:  Fairfax County website, pictures of Dolley Madison library.

And do the opposite.

For my part, I suggested that this would work a lot better if they did what every new commercial structure on Maple is doing, and put the bulk of the parking underground.  That would have allowed the Town to wrap the new library around a little pocket park, and avoid having a huge above-ground parking garage as the centerpiece of Vienna.  Outlined like so, with the park in green, surface parking in black, and a two-story library in blue.

This was, of course, completely ignored.  Why should the Town put the parking underground just because every other responsible decisionmaker along that stretch of road was doing exactly that.

But, Town staff assured us to ignore all this claptrap, because the original design was just a something-something-something and they were already redesigning it.  Don’t worry yourself about it.

Anybody who could do arithmetic soon realized that this was going to be one very crowded site.  The proposed building will have 3.4 times as many parking places (213) and 1.5 times as much library floor area (21,000 square feet), as the current library.  To fit in both an enlarged library, and all that additional parking was going to be a trick, no matter how you stacked it.  It was going to fill that lot with building, side-to-side, front-to-back.  (Unless you put the parking underground, as illustrated above.)  As I put it in that prior post, everything is going to get 25% closer together, get stacked much higher, and even with that, it’s a given that all the green space is history.

Source: Google Earth.

In June the Town of Vienna got the formal proposal from the architects chosen to design the new library.  This was presented in a Town Council work session (now called conference session, I think.)  You can see the documents at this link.

The good news is that, as of the June iteration, the architects managed to cram all of that on the lot and mostly hide the parking garage.  You now have a tall one-story library running the length of Maple.  The majority of the lot is taken up by a four-level parking garage running behind that.  The proposed library manages to hide about two-third of the view of the parking garage, when viewed from Maple.

As is mandatory with new Town of Vienna buildings, this is more-or-less the largest structure that could possibly fit on that lot.  There will be some little vestiges of green, but otherwise this appears to fill every legally available square foot, and nearly every legally available cubic foot, of space.

The latest design, delivered to the Town just a few days ago, shoves the building back off the street a bit, provides a bit of open space, provides access to the school behind the library, and and tries harder to hide the garage when viewed from Maple Avenue.  Those all seem like improvements over the last iteration.  You can download the most recent design from this TOV web page.

The result is this:

Source:  Fairfax County, VA, URL given above.

This obviously won’t be as spacious and neat as the architect’s rendering makes it look.  And it has more-or-less nothing to do with anything that’s on Maple Avenue now, not even the new construction under MAC.  And, based on the description, they’re going to have to ask for a few zoning variances to be able to shoehorn that onto the lot.

But at this point, I think we can breathe a sigh of relief.  As in, the library will have windows.  And they’ve done their best to hide the fact that the bulk of the building is a parking garage.  And so on.

Looks like they are keeping the goofy, environmentally unfriendly, and completely unnecessary acorn street lights.  Which are now jarringly out of place in front of this aluminum-and-glass building exterior.

All that glass surface means this is a small environmental disaster due to the heating and cooling load through all that window area.  (I’m sure the Town will point to LEED certification, but all that means is that they’ve constructed it well, not that the design isn’t an energy hog from the start.)  But if they go with modern heat pumps, the (now-mandatory) de-carbonization of the Virginia grid will eventually reduce the C02 emissions from those large heating and cooling loads.

Unlike the other big new buildings on Maple, this one isn’t adding to the existing congestion.  We won’t have hundreds of people living there, or streams of new business flowing into and out of it.  By and large, it’s going to serve the people who use that library now.  So, in contrast to other construction occurring on Maple, this is mostly harmless despite the size.

All in all, it’s not my cup of tea, in this tightly-packed urban context.  But it could have been a lot worse.  Most importantly, it will work, as a library, and it hides the fact that it’s mostly a parking garage.  Anything beyond that is gravy.