After 15 years and over $110 million, Butler Library renovations are finally coming to an end.
The project is nearing the conclusion of its fifth and final stage, which primarily focuses on renovating and expanding graduate study spaces on the seventh, eighth, and ninth floors.
“We’re really down to this small basket of things that need to be sorted out and finished up,” said project coordinator Aline Locascio.
An alumna of Columbia’s now defunct Library School, Locascio has been working on the renovation since it began in 1995.
“I was excited to come coordinate this project because I remembered the building,” Locascio said. “And I remembered this beautiful building but I also remembered some aspects that could have used some attention.”
Built in the 1930s, Butler was advanced for its time, with a pneumatic tube network and state-of-the-art climate control system in the stacks. By the late 80s, however, it was clear that the facilities were in need of an upgrade.
“A lot of it [what needed to be done] was mechanical,” Locascio said. “Every time you turned something on here all the circuits blew because it was built in the 30s.”
In addition to assuring that the building could support 21st century technology, they are updating the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems, as well as installing a new fire safety apparatus.
Locascio also tackled the issue of space. Working with architectural firm Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott, the renovation team overhauled book storage in the stacks and started an off-site storage facility for some of the collection’s more infrequently used books.
“We had books on the floor, they were just everywhere,” Locascio said. “The people trying to shelve had a very difficult time. The books were getting damaged—it was just not working.”
In addition to renovations in the stacks, space has been reclaimed in new reading rooms that had previously been used for administrative or cataloguing work.
“I remember always walking past what’s now 202 Butler—the “fishbowl”—which used to be a book processing area,” said librarian Karen Green in an email. “The windows were completely covered over except for the very top, and I could just see the beautiful plaster ceiling and wonder what the rest of the room looked like.”
Those plaster ceilings, along with other such early 20th century craftsmanship as carved woodwork, metal detailing, and painted murals were all rigorously restored during the renovation. For Locascio, upholding the regal dignity of the original building was as important as modernizing its infrastructure.
“We always tried to maintain the grandeur of what was there, when we could,” Locascio said. “For example, light fixtures. They were 1930s technology—not energy efficient, not exactly the quality light that we can now generate, but beautiful. …They got taken down, sent out, cleaned, and repaired, if they needed, with all new guts. So the mechanism is modern but the fixture is original.”
In other cases, where more unsightly modern influences had crept in, changes were made to restore the building to its roots.
“The old Burgess-Carpenter Library on the 4th floor was … simply hideous,” Green said. “Dreadful ‘70s-era orange carpet everywhere, peeling down to black rubber, and dark warrens of rooms. All those walls were ripped out to make the new Periodicals & Microfilms Reading Room, which is almost entirely open from north to south.”
Students seem to be responding positively to the renovations—according to Locascio, attendance has skyrocketed.
“There was a lot of talk at the beginning of this project that ‘Oh, people probably won’t go to libraries anymore, because they can just sit at their computers,’” Locascio said. “But it didn’t happen that way here.”
Robert Petito, CC ’13, is one such frequent patron. He said that although he didn’t know there was a renovation underway, he does enjoy studying in Butler most of the time.
“I like the George and Jesse Siegel Reading Room on the fourth floor,” Petito said. “It feels secretive even though everyone knows about it. It’s just nice—it’s high up, it has a big window.”
And where would Locascio go to study if she were a student?
“It would be the old catalogue room, 310, in those little alcoves upstairs,” she said. “I think those are just lovely because you feel like you’re in a bigger room, but you also feel like you’re in a private space. And it’s beautiful.”
jeremy.bleeke@columbiaspectator.com
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