 |
|
With a new public-school library in Queens, the Robin Hood Foundation and
Weiss/Manfredi prove that design can transform a community in need.
By Martin C. Pedersen and Paul Makovsky
October 2002
 |
 |
|
|
Lonni Tanner
Director of Special Projects, Robin Hood Foundation
Juanita Bass
Principal, PS 42, Queens
Marion Weiss
Weiss/Manfredi Architects |
|
Michael Manfredi
Weiss/Manfredi Architects
Elisa Burke
Librarian, PS 42, Queens
Rod Luccioni
Administrative Architect, New York City Board of Education |
|
|
|
|
 |
At PS 42, in Far Rockaway, Queens, architects Marion Weiss and Michael
Manfredi turned a gymnasium identical to this one into an inspired
library.
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Offsite:
Robin Hood Foundation, 212-227-6601, info@rhny.net,
www.robinhood.org; Weiss/Manfredi, (212) 760-9002; to buy Site Specific:
The Work of Weiss/Manfredi Architects, log on to www.metropolismag.com
and click on "Bookstore"
|
Lonni Tanner: We looked at a hundred different schools to pick the first
ten. We were looking for schools that were showing a commitment to improving
and that needed the program as a resource for the community. One of the
reasons we picked PS 42 was that it seemed to be located in the middle of
nowhere. You felt like tumbleweeds were blowing through town. But Juanita
Bass is a passionate and dedicated principal. And although the school was
not performing at a level we were thrilled about, we thought, "Here's
a person we should invest in."
Juanita Bass: Far Rockaway is home for me. My father attended PS 42 in the
1920s! I went to school here too. I can vividly recall being in first
grade and watching my older sister graduate in her white dress, waving to
me in the hallway as she passed my room. But I don't remember the library.
When I became principal in 1991, it was a real homecoming, and the library--what
I now call our deplorable old library--was up on the fourth floor.
Tanner: At the outset it seemed that design was an important part of the
learning process. So I called my friend Henry Myerberg, who's an architect,
and asked him to recruit 10 architects. The goal was to come up with a new
model for what an elementary school library should be; what it should look
like; what technology should be in it.
Marion Weiss: When Henry first invited us, we thought, "If there's
anything we feel committed to on a spiritual level, it's a library."
So I went to the meeting where they paired schools and architects. It was
basically a series of blind dates.
Michael Manfredi: After the meeting Marion came back with this little slip
of paper.
Weiss: And Michael looked at the geographic distribution of the schools
and said, "Marion, we've managed to draw the most remote library in
the project." It's like an hour and forty minutes to Far Rockaway from
Manhattan.
Manfredi: A week later Robin Hood arranged a site visit and an introduction
to the principal.
|
|
 |
|
|
|
To convert an institutional gymnasium into a beloved library,
Weiss/Manfredi Architects masked support columns in an undulating wall
(right). The library storytelling area (above) is demarcated by a sheer
curtain whose design, created by Pentagram, includes words selected by
students. |
|
 |
Bass: Before they arrived I didn't completely understand what Lonni had
in mind. I thought it was going to be one of the Board of Ed jobs where
they come in and spruce up the place: paint, add a few books. And I thought,
"OK, anything is better than what we have now."
Elisa Burke: The old library was a dreary blue room with about 3,000 outdated
books and an encyclopedia from 1973.
Tanner: Some of the other libraries were worse. You'd have books that hadn't
been taken out in decades with titles like Red Man, White Man or
Man Walks on Moon. What I saw was so sad.
Manfredi: So Juanita and Elisa met us at the front door, escorted us upstairs,
and showed us a few classrooms.
Weiss: It was clear this was a well-maintained school. You could sense the
pride invested in the building.
Manfredi: We spent about an hour in the library. In those old schools it
was always on the top floor: the "quiet" spot. There were
some wonderful things you could do up there, but Juanita kept saying, "I
want to get the parents involved. The library has to be central to the school."
Bass: Lonni and the architects looked at the space and thought it was fine,
but they had one problem with it. Marion said, "The first thing
I learned in architecture school was location, location, location. What
do you have down on the first floor?" "Nothing,"
I said. "Just two ugly spaces that we call our gyms or play areas.
Nothing but a couple basketball hoops." These were the old boys and
girls gyms. So Marion said, "Well, show us the space."
Weiss: We came downstairs--this was at the end of the meeting--took one
look at the gyms, and asked, "Could you rethink the whole program?
Could you use just one gym?" Then we started pacing it off, considering
all the possibilities.
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
The library is a flexible space with movable bookshelves and seating that
can be configured for public events (top) or private reading time (bottom).
|
Bass: Marion was just thinking out loud and sketching at the same time.
She said, "We could do wonders with this space, especially if we could
also have the parent room next door. It wouldn't be as large as the two
rooms upstairs--the old library and math lab--but it would be magnificent."
Manfredi: To Lonni's credit, she kept saying, "Well, why don't you
put the library down here?" By the end of the evening, it was clear
this was the solution. But that would be more challenging, because it required
a lot more demolition and structural work. The thing that freaked me out
more than anything was the fear of getting stuck in this Byzantine approvals
process at the Board of Ed. That was pretty daunting.
Bass: A couple weeks later I got a call from Lonni: "We've decided
to build a library in your school."
"Yes! What happens now?" I asked.
"The architects will be in touch," she said. And they were. I
heard constantly from Marion and Michael. Very early--it might have been
that first night--Marion said, "I'm thinking of something like
a Worm Wall." I didn't know what she was talking about.
Manfredi: Juanita kept saying the library had to be visible to students
walking to and from the cafeteria.
Weiss: We were thinking that it somehow needed to be "other."
It needed to be like a magic cube that made kids desperately curious about
what was going on inside of the wavy wall.
Manfredi: We also wanted people to sit in and around the wall. To be wrapped
and lined in books.
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
Architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi |
|
Librarian Elisa Burke |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
Principal Juanita Bass |
|
Student Aamir Holloway |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
Parent Maria P. Monti |
|
Director of the Robin Hood Foundation Lonni Tanner |
|
|
Weiss: Once we actually looked at the plan, it was kind of a doodle to say,
"It's got to be narrow here to fit, but how much room can we take
out of this other space?" Then it was a question of how far we could
go: how much book storage, how much seating we could create by making the
wall as long as possible, stretching it.
Manfredi: Juanita wanted a storytelling area.
Weiss: So we had this idea for a curtain. At one point we thought about
using really rich fabrics. But Juanita said, "The librarian needs to
see what's going on." So the translucent curtain came out of a pragmatic
need and, in the end, was more beautiful than anything we'd imagined early
on.
Manfredi: After we'd had a couple of meetings at the school, we invited
Juanita to the studio and showed her the model.
Bass: That was such a joy. All of the major elements were basically there
in that little model.
Burke: Looking at it suddenly made the project real for us.
Bass: Elisa and I were flabbergasted. It was like Marion and Michael
could read our minds.
Weiss: This was a project where our first instincts--the Worm Wall
and reading curtain--were there early on. Other ideas followed. For instance,
we had to figure out where to put all the extra books. That led us
to the idea of movable bookshelves with floor tracks. It added flexibility
to the space, but it was something that followed once we realized we couldn't
fit 8,000 volumes in that area.
Manfredi: Construction was supposed to start in January 2001. But it took
forever to get moving.
Weiss: It would be, "Hurry up! Get the drawings done by April."
We'd kill ourselves, stay late, work weekends, the drawings would go out--and
then we wouldn't hear anything.
Manfredi: Early on Henry Myerberg warned us, "Look, guys, we're trying
to do this quickly. And we're trying to do it in the context of the Board
of Ed culture." He didn't say "Temper your ambitions," but
"Do something fantastic that can be done quickly--and executed by contractors
who don't do exotic metal work for Peter Marino."
Burke: They started in August. As soon as I saw the Dumpster outside the
school, I knew they were breaking down the wall and the library was underway.
|
|
 |
Behind the storytelling area, the Pentagram-designed logo is visible above the library door.
|
Manfredi: But the project moved like molasses.
Weiss: Sometimes you'd go out there and nobody would be on the job site.
You'd go out one week and return a month later and it looked like nothing
had happened.
Rod Luccioni: When we started the libraries, we were also doing 40 million
dollars' worth of renovation work for the board. School construction is
a low-bid field, and trying to keep the contractors focused on a project
that's not making them the kind of profit normal work does is very
difficult.
Manfredi: Plus no one anticipated that there might be a mismatch between
what the contractors were used to doing and what these Robin Hood projects
required. Rod did a very good job of pushing the contractors.
Weiss: Originally we'd designed a soffit over the reading curtain.
We felt if we were going to have a round, continuous curtain we needed to
drop the ceiling a bit. So we decided to drop it a bit more to make it look
intentional. When the Sheetrock was put in, it looked awful, and I felt
really terrible. This was one of the more challenging things to construct,
and now I was asking them to deconstruct it. It didn't seem like a huge
deal; clearly it was our fault. Well, it was as if we had asked for gold-plated
bookshelves.
Manfredi: It took a month of negotiation.
Weiss: There were conference calls where I remember thinking, "I'll
do the carrot and stick. OK, I'll do the carrot, the stick, the whine, the
moan." Dozens of phone calls. I finally had to get Juanita into
the act: "Make it sound like it's your idea."
Manfredi: At one point we volunteered to do the work ourselves.
Weiss: We just wanted to go there on the weekend and rip the thing down.
After three weeks of chronic phone calls, Rod said, "How strongly do
you feel about this?" And I thought, "Ah, here's our window..."
Luccioni: The contractors had spent so much time building it, they didn't
want to take it down. But I hate to see a grown woman cry. And I understood
Marion's point. We asked the contractors to remove it. And they reluctantly,
but willfully, did so.
Bass: During construction the school was buzzing. Elisa and I put brown
paper over the windows to keep the kids from looking in. We were hoping
to take it down in time for Christmas, but the completion date kept getting
pushed back. And the skeptics on my staff began to grumble.
Burke: A lot of teachers didn't think the library was going to happen. So
every once in a while I'd take one inside and their eyes would light up.
Weiss: The architects working on the other libraries were also having problems
with their contractors, so Robin Hood brought in Sciame Construction Company
as managers. That was a major breakthrough.
Manfredi: They were more experienced with sophisticated design and were
able to help the contractors make it work.
Tanner: Sciame donated their time and expertise. We would have been dead
without them.
Weiss: We'd all heard about how only contractors who can handle six-month
payment delays would ever consider doing a project for the Board of Ed.
But in the end, they did a very good job.
Bass: When it was finally done, and the paper was pulled back, I had
a faculty meeting and said, "OK, all you skeptics, come downstairs
with me." I opened the library doors, and they just stood outside.
They didn't want to come in. It was almost as if they felt they were entering
sacred space. "Just come in," I said, whispering. And they were
amazed. They had their mouths wide open, speechless. "We had no idea
this was going on inside that wall," one teacher said.
Manfredi: The most obvious lesson we learned--or relearned--was that you
can be a great designer and do terrific work, but if you don't have
an enthusiastic client with ideas, it's not going to be as much fun, and
it's not likely to be as good. We felt a real obligation to Juanita and
her kids.
Tanner: The biggest challenge facing this project is funding and public
support. But we're going to keep pushing. And we'll spend a lot of money
on project evaluation. Are kids taking out more books? Are teachers using
the libraries more frequently? Are parents more involved? We're also moving
forward with another twenty libraries. Kids don't care who's the chancellor
or who's running the Board of Education: they have to go to school, and
they want that experience to be positive and memorable.
Bass: This is a magical place. We get so much sun in the afternoon, there's
a glow. And the kids want to come here. More and more I'm hearing, "Oh,
no, I don't want to go outside. Can I come to the library?" This is
what every principal and teacher dreams about. From the very beginning,
the people at Robin Hood have been reminding us: don't forget, you have
to name the library. Elisa had a library committee meeting where that was
on the agenda. There were two names nominated. One was a firefighter
lost at the World Trade Center. But Elisa did some research and found out
that he'd never attended the school. The other name was my father's. The
committee said, "He was a student at 42. And our motto, after all,
is 'Leaders of the Future.' He produced our principal. So why not name it
after Waldo Emerson Brooks?" (My grandmother had a thing for Ralph
Waldo Emerson.) So having this amazing space named after him has made this
whole adventure extremely special to me.
|
|
|
BACK TO TOP
