Ashgrove Reading Rooms

We started with a fortnight of counting. Every hour the branch was open, someone from our office sat in the corner and recorded what people were doing.

Borrowing accounted for a little under a fifth of visits. The rest were job applications, benefits paperwork, homework, warmth, childcare handovers, and a large and completely undocumented amount of people simply sitting down somewhere that did not require them to buy a coffee.

Designing for the other four-fifths

None of that was a surprise to the librarians. It was a surprise to the brief, which described a lending library with some incidental study space.

The rebuilt plan inverts the ratio. The stack is compact, well-lit and easy to browse, and it occupies about a quarter of the floor. Everything else is rooms of different acoustic character: a loud room where children are welcome, a quiet room where they are not, four bookable cells with doors, and a long table by the window that nobody has to book.

Acoustic zoning without walls everywhere

Separating those conditions without carving the plan into corridors meant working the section instead. Ceiling heights change between zones, the CLT soffit is exposed in the loud room and lined in the quiet one, and a full-height bookcase does the acoustic work of a partition while staying visually open.

If you can hear the children's room from the study room, one of those rooms will lose.

Money

The scheme came in under a genuinely tight public budget because it reused the existing foundations and ground slab. Surveying them properly cost about eleven thousand pounds and saved somewhere over three hundred thousand. That is not a design insight, but it is the reason the rest of the design survived value engineering.