Many, many years ago I visited the new library at the State University of New York at Brockport and was told that when the architect designed the building he forgot to add the weight of the books to his calculations and as a result the structure would not hold too many books and that is why the library’s stacks are so empty. Some years later I visited the library at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and was told the same thing. I have since heard that this is one of the most common “urban legends” on college campuses. I am curious. About what other school libraries have you heard this claim?
Here’s the Snopes page on it. They say the list is “endless” , but only name one where that story is told:
If you use a search engine on “library books weight architect urban legend” you get lots of hits from individual college libraries that say the legend has been told about them, but I don’t see any comprehensive lists.
I haven’t heard that one, but when San Francisco built a new central library, they put in a lot of art and computer stuff but forgot to plan enough space for the existing collection, much less for expansion. It caused something of a scandal when people discovered that a whole lot of books–a couple of hundred thousand–had been quietly dumped without regard to their value.
Go to the SF Main library–it’s a beautiful building, but there aren’t as many books as you might expect to find in the central library of a major city.
As an Architect I can assure you this is an urban legend. There is no way any competent Architect or Structural Engineer is going to forget the live or dead loading in a library or any structure. And it would also have been caught by the Building Department in case the first two were so incompetent to do that. The chances all three entities would fail to catch this would seem to make this a very unlikely scenario.
Also most public buildings now have a peer review so that is another entity that would likely catch such an error
In another sense, I think some library architects forget the books, and are actually thwarted concert hall designers. The county I live in has 23 branches. The newer ones all have these open plans, lots of wasted space, hardly any books, with at least 30-foot ceilings that have a few skylights. Not many, if any windows in the walls. No place to put lighting near the stacks, so it’s as shadowy and dim as a restaurant. I always wish I had brought a flashlight. No ventilation, so it’s always hot and stinky. The accoustics are great—you can hear everything.
All three of my schools had a variation on this myth, since the schools were built on swamps the libraries + books were slowly sinking into the ground.
I was very fond of the old library at my university, which seemed to be nine stories of steel bookshelves, with pieces of floor bolted to the shelves at appropriate intervals. It was like it was built with an erector set or something. You could look down, and at the edge of the bottom of the shelf there would be a small gap between it and the floor, so you could see the shelves below too. The window wells went all the way down. It was neat, but was eventually declared seismically unsafe.
I think this myth arises because so many people grew with local libraries that had open stacks. They walk into the fancy new library, don’t see any books, and a legend is born.
The fact is that many, if not most, very large collections (especially valuable collections) are closed: you look in the catalog for what you need, request your books from the desk, and determine which, if any, you need to check out. Getting a stack pass at these libraries is a big deal, and you usually need to be a well-established researcher to do so.
Few libraries carry a substantial portion of the collection in closed stacks anymore. Closed stacks still exist, and are rising in popularity, but if you go into a library with few open stacks, it’s not likely to have a lot of closed stacks.
I doubt this. The legend is decades old (I heard it when I was looking at colleges), and most of the books were on open shelves. For that matter, in most college libraries I’ve been in, the books still are in open shelves. Even Harvard (which has its Weidener books in stacks closed to outsiders) has the books in its other libraries in open stacks.
Which colleges have no open sheling?
The version I heard was a lab building where they didn’t add in the weight of water in the pipes.
At my alma mater (Rensselaer), the library is built into the side of a hill overlooking Troy, NY and the myth was that the library building was sliding down the hill.
In my town they just totally rebuilt an elementary school, but forgot to add the price of bookcases for the library into the budget.
So now they have stacks of books on the floor, and no shelves to put them on! Can’t blame the architects for that one.
The Widener Library stacks are open to all students, staff, and faculty (only the rare stuff is by request, plus all the stuff kept offsite because there’s not enough room…) The stacks themselves are along the “hole under the bottom shelf you can see the next floor through” lines; there’s a couple of places where I swear a well-aimed penny could fall from the 5th floor to the first subbasement.
I was told this story about the Northwestern library on a campus tour in 1977. The library is built on lakefill. I think I’ve heard since that the library is sinking slowly, but because of poor knowledge of the soil, not the unaccounted for weight of the books.
I’m not an architect or engineer but, as a structural/architectural draftsman who’s worked with several of each over the years, I can confirm what HM stated above.
Furthermore, if any eng/arch did forget such a critical design factor, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were brought up for disciplinary action by their professional associations. Such incompetence would warrant pretty strict penalties.
Not that this would be likely to happen, though. There are just too many people involved in the design and review process for something like this to escape attention. That’s not to say that blunders, even big ones, aren’t made but the vast majority of them are caught before the shovel even hits the dirt.
I can’t speak for how things were designed several decades ago, but for as long as I’ve been in the business (since the mid-90s) soil quality has always been taken into account by the structural engineer.
Typically, one of the first things a developer or general contractor will do is commission a report from a geo-technical engineer. They’ll go onto the site to take core samples (the number of which usually depends on the location and size of the proposed building) and then run a number lab tests. They’ll then issue a report which the struct. eng. will use as a basis for his foundation design. Sometimes an owner or developer will want to waive the soils investigation and, depending on the location and the whim of that particular engineer, they may be allowed to do so. In that case, however, the engineer will usually design for the worst soils conditions and may even insist on a letter absolving them from responsibility in case damage occurs from undue settlement.
Fill is definitely the worst soil to design for and I know a few engineers who’ll pass on a project if the soil is too lousy. For those who take it on, they’ll either use pile foundations or mat foundations, both of which can be extremely expensive. I’ve seen a few owners suffer from serious sticker-shock when building on crappy soil.
The version at my school was the theater where they forgot about the weight of snow and after the first winter, the roof distorted. Or such was the explanation for the absolutely horrible acoustics.
I originally heard this story in about 1987, also regarding UMass at Amherst. In that case, there was a tinge of elitism in it, as I was attending one of the nearby private colleges (which were part of an arrangement allowing student to take classes at any of the five schools.) UMass was the only public school in the group and had by far the largest library, so any serious research usually involved a trip to their campus. I always got the idea that even though they had more resources (books) than we did, the bad architect myth was a swipe at public education in general.
I am pretty sure that later I heard the story about someplace in England and it dawned on me that it was just that, a story.
I interpreted the OP as less a question of whether or not the mistake had ever been made, but whether people had been told that it had.
Another RPI guy. I have no idea where on the scale from 100% truthful to 100% BS this falls (as a guess, I’ll say that this is about 2/3 BS) but here’s what Not the Rensselaer Handbook (note: copyright 1985) says:
I was there 1996-2001, and while the elevator wasn’t exactly “useless”, it wasn’t particularly useful, sometimes changing direction between the floor one got on and the requested floor. My theory at the time was that it was still executing calls from years past, most people having given up and taken the stairs long before the elevator actually showed up. I seem to recall the stairwells (I think after freshman year I gave up on the elevator) being very spacious and having flat-screen monitors with some sort of video project theoretically on display. Also, the whole place looked like it was directly inspired by Boston City Hall.
