Faith in the Library's Future

With the Opening of a Flagship Building in Rockville, Montgomery Bets the Public Will Keep Coming Back

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A New Look for Libraries
The designers of Montgomery County's new library aim to prove that libraries can compete with bookstores and personal computers in the new information age.

Librarians, those experts in answering people's questions, had a few vexing ones for themselves as they contemplated their relevance in the Internet age.

Mainly, they wanted to know whether people could be lured away from the comforts of home electronic centers to go to the public library. They wondered whether the public library could be hip enough, comfortable enough and relaxed enough to make people want to hang out there. They looked at the way bookstores have been retooled and asked: Why not try the same thing with libraries?

The $26.3 million Rockville regional library, opening at noon today, is the symbol of Montgomery County's optimistic answer to those questions. It is the answer, the building's architects and the county's elected officials say, to the question of whether libraries can still be players in the international information bazaar.

"People were predicting the demise of the book, how everything was going to be electronic and . . . digital and that libraries would shrink," said Melanie Hennigan, the lead architect. "It couldn't be further from the truth. . . . What's happened is the Internet has spawned a renaissance in libraries."

The District, too, is considering a new central library downtown, a project with an estimated cost of as much as $275 million, 10 times the cost of the Rockville facility. But a decision on replacing the present flagship, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 901 G St. NW, has been postponed indefinitely.

Montgomery's new flagship library, in the heart of Rockville's revitalized town square, has more space, more computers with Internet access, more WiFi hookups and more materials to lend than the old Rockville library, which was smaller, darker and short on parking spaces.

The Rockville library has visual showstoppers. Along Maryland Avenue is a 200-foot-long wall of wavy glass, made to filter out 98 percent of damaging ultraviolet rays. Inside, lounging chairs have been placed along the wall to "open up the building to the outside," said Hennigan, an experienced library designer with Grimm & Parker Architects, based in Bethesda and McLean.

The main entrance, off the cobblestone plaza of the new town square, is set off by a glass canopy and has nine video screens airing local interest television programs.

Visitors step through that door and enter a pumpkin-colored corridor with a wavy wall, which Hennigan dubbed "the wonder wall." It has video display terminals with touch screens that can be used to access the library's electronic catalogue.

At the end of the wonder wall is the biggest "wow" feature. It's a soaring central rotunda, accented by a half-spiral staircase that rises 20 feet to the second floor. At ground level, directly below the ceiling, a terrazzo mosaic is illuminated by 250 tiny lights suspended from the rotunda.

Nearby is the main circulation desk, another wavy structure, this one birch covered in burnished copper. The wave motif, Hennigan said, is supposed to be a "super-subtle" nod to the mapping of the human genome, completed by government and private scientists in Montgomery six years ago.

The building is a showcase for the county's new approach to libraries, officials said. For the first time in Rockville, patrons will be allowed to bring coffee and snacks inside. A Starbucks is set to open this spring across the square. "This library wants to be what the Barnes & Noble is to Bethesda Row," said Hennigan, referring to another revitalized retail area of the county. "Just as cool. Just as fun."