Handling an eclectic collection that includes fragile ancient maps, papyrus, daguerreotypes
and photographs, paintings, rare books, Mark Twain's original manuscripts and correspondence,
well that's job enough.
But what if you have to move it all?
The seismic retrofit of the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley.
Coming up on Great Libraries of the World.
What do you take to the library?
A notebook?
A laptop?
For the past 12 months, if you came to the Bancroft Library at the University of California
at Berkeley, you needed to bring one of these.
I think the way to think about it is if you had a keepsake of some kind, a ring or a document,
like a special love letter or something that was so precious to you that in a fire or disaster
you'd stick it in your code and run out the door.
You are the public and the public had 50 million of these items.
That's the way to think of the Bancroft Library.
The collaboration between our library administration, our staff, our contractors, our campus project
managers and our architects and consultants has been really wonderful.
It's hard to define.
I'm not sure what is a letter or an item.
There's a letter that has 10 pages and there's a letter with two pages.
We have roughly 17,000 letters that people wrote to him and he saves those and doesn't
save every one, unfortunately, but he saves an awful lot of them and usually says something
on the envelope, you know, a damn fool or whatever.
So without ever having counted yet, I mean, if I had to make an estimate about the number
of pages that have survived, I would say it's getting up there toward a million.
I first started planning for this in 1995 and my first timeline showed that we finished
seven years ago.
In this process, we are losing something like 24,000 square feet and this was for seismic
reasons.
We had tears that didn't go all the way out to the edges and were a threat to the building
if we have a quake and that building sits roughly 300 yards from the Hayward Fault and
the last time that fault lit rip was in 1868 and it knocked the trees down.
We know that because we have the only photos in this collection.
In the spring of 2001, I got a call from Tom Koster who was the Associate Vice Chancellor
for Capital Projects Budgeting.
It doesn't look like this project is going to start until 2008 or 2009 and I said, oh,
that's great because that will give us time to start cultivating donors and three months
later I get a call from Tom Koster and he said, well, the building that was scheduled
for the Davis campus has been postponed and so this money has now become available and
we want to start doing this project in 2003.
And by the way, you've got 24 hours to make a decision.
So that's when I said we've got to do this because if we don't take this opportunity,
Lord knows when it'll come our way again and that's how it all started.
The architects chosen for the Bancroft Library Seismic Retrofit were the Ratcliffe Architects
working with Knoll and Tam Architects and Planners.
Our first job in our architecture firm was for the library at Berkeley.
We did a renovation of the Art History Slide Library and that was back in 1992.
They have more current background on doing libraries than we do, yes.
We probably have more large building experience so together we made a very good team for approaching
all the issues that showed up on this library.
In the practice of Knoll and Tam, we've focused a lot on projects that are really for the
community and projects that are bigger than just ourselves and have a sort of future for
everyone who uses them and so we do a lot of community projects where community process
and community participation is actually part of the design.
My role in this particular project, the Bancroft, has been to really help facilitate the process
because in a community process you're dealing with more than just a single owner, you're
really dealing with a whole group of people and the stakeholders are endless.
We were very anxious about the budget for the project.
This is an unusual project.
It's the largest fundraising effort that the Berkeley University Library has ever been
involved in and it happened to be something that focused on the Bancroft Library alone.
We were required to raise about $34 million to match a comparable amount from the state
funding and it wasn't at all clear that we were going to be able to achieve this.
It's how to characterize, how to define the project and how to get a decent cost on it
and then how to model enough escalation so that you put that all in so in your capital
planning process you're not stuck down the road.
Well, when this project was first kind of conceptually modeled and a budget was set,
it was in the low 20 millions.
And when we got involved we knew that there had been significant escalation.
We knew it had to be late 20s, early 30s, but nobody really kind of wants to hear about
that.
Halfway through the planning, the construction costs in the Bay Area just shot up.
This was just about the time that China started going through its economic boom and they were
sucking up enormous amounts of cement and steel.
So in fact the budget pretty much doubled from the original estimate.
How do you go about asking people to give money to the library?
I call them up and I say, hi, Jim, hi, Sally, hi, Joe, Kathy, I'd like to have lunch with
you sometime soon because I want to ask you for some money.
This kickoff meeting was kind of great and we all sat around the room and it was an opportunity
for everyone to voice their opinion and their vision for the Bancroft in three words.
The renovation of the Bancroft is complicated by history.
The library is physically joined to the Doe Library built in 1910 and designed by then
campus architect John Galen Howard in the Beaux Art Classical style.
The Bancroft itself was designed in that same style by a later but also famous architect
Arthur Brown Jr.
The new Bancroft had not only to be safer, more accessible and provide a secure environment
for its holdings, it had to be true to the spirit of Howard and Brown and that Beaux
Art tradition.
The decision was made that the cheapest thing to do, the clearest response to the problem
at hand would be to gut the interior and keep the shell of the building.
Why?
Because aesthetically it was important to keep that part of the university looking the same
in a sort of status quo and because making an entire exterior of the building would have
changed its historical look and destroyed the area of the campus which is rather beautiful
and harmonious.
As architects here we are trying to renovate this building, we're trying to respect both
the connection to Doe proper but also work within the context of Arthur Brown's spirit.
It was very challenging.
It didn't always sit with how the Bancroft folks saw things should go and the design
kind of unfolded from there.
We did different trials, we looked at both styles, we thought we had it figured out,
turned out we did not and the donors agreed we did not so we worked harder to try and
find the right interior expression which largely the project was inter-oriented.
The exterior was formed and we weren't allowed to touch it for historic reasons too much
but the inside was really where the challenge was and the style had to really look back
to old world libraries.
That was their sense of the collection, the importance of the Bancroft collection was
such that they wanted more of a worldly architectural statement, they didn't really like the streamlined
simple look that Arthur Brown had set up in the building.
So we had to take it back in time a little bit to a collection or an expression of the
collection that they felt was appropriate.
I've been involved in another reconstruction at the Bancroft High Road because I have been
here for many years.
The original one was an interesting experience because in that one the staff were basically
not consulted, they were told and when they pointed out shortcomings and inefficiencies
and impovabilities they were largely ignored.
In the public areas I think we did have to negotiate quite a bit in terms of reading
room, again I think they're thinking of that as an experience of people in place and being
in the place because it's an aesthetic experience whereas we're obviously thinking about preserving
the material, making sure that things are handled properly, making sure that we can
have sightings on all of the researchers that are looking at the material.
We slowly worked our way through understanding the collections, understanding their space
needs and how we needed to arrange the space, working with the overall library or organization
to determine how are we going to reorganize this building.
That was a huge part of our whole project and we had to simultaneously work out the seismic
rehab of the building because it was a concrete building, it was very near the Hayward Fault,
it was a dangerous building and we needed to strengthen it and we wanted to strengthen
it in a way that didn't destroy the integrity of the building because it is, even though
it's built in the 15th, it's considered a historic building on the campus and it's
actually quite a nice building.
Our drawings really show the reconstruction but the deconstructing of it was quite a thing
to see and it was like a bombed-out shell of a building at one point.
Once we strip everything out of the building, how are we going to put it back together,
we're getting better.
The interest in the Bancroft Library is on the east side of the building and it connects
in a very sort of formal Beaux-Arts way to the main part of Doe Library so you'd expect
if you walked into that entrance which faces the Campanile, you'd be able to walk through
the Doe Library but no, you couldn't do that.
You just hit a stair and you go up to the offices of the Bancroft Library so in our
reconfiguration now that door becomes another entrance to Doe Library and the corridor takes
you straight through to Doe Library and it just kind of really changes the whole complex
of what it's going to be like when we're done.
You say bosses, goals, drivers, budgets, they're all our bosses in the end and they
all want something and the goal is to lay out clearly what are the key drivers, never
forgetting which ones are really truly the drivers and in this case safety was a driver
and then the collections, the safety and preservation of the collections was the real driver.
Everybody else under that fits under something and you have to figure that out and then there's
stratification under that and oh by the way you're building a building.
The first floor which has 12 foot high shelves, its existing slab would not accommodate the
load of these shelves.
They're upwards of I think 600 pounds per square foot and it rolls.
So for early on we were putting in steel beams beneath the first floor into the basement
ceiling to support this rolling load and that became so problematic that at one point during
a structural peer review the light bulb sort of went off and what we ended up actually
doing, marrying in a new slab over the existing slab, six inches and tying them together.
So in effect now our new slab is 11 inches of concrete and that is able to sustain the
rolling load and we didn't have to introduce all this steel in the basement.
You've got a Beaux-Arts elevation with nice little stairs.
It wasn't a very big portal but it was well done.
Arthur Brown did a good job and yet you're being told to put a ramp on it.
Well what comes to mind when you do a Beaux-Arts building?
Symmetry, proportion, authenticity of materials, all these things come up and yet.
No ramps.
It's a rehab.
New building is hard to do and you know greenfields but rehab is always a lot tougher especially
we have an existing structure we're trying to work with and we've got an occupied space
over there with the libraries with the students.
They rule the rules and they should.
A place for everything and everything in its place that's the basic library.
Museums are places that are repositories for beautiful art objects or archaeological objects
or whatever.
This place is a repository for manuscripts, for written objects, for printed rare printed
objects, for photographs.
So the idea is to take students who have not had the opportunity to see these sometimes
very ancient things and to show them the utility of actually looking at a document.
On the internet you see a written manuscript perhaps but on the internet sometimes it's
very difficult to turn it over and look at it.
What's on the recto?
What's on the backside of the thing?
Maybe there's a note that's very important.
The three that you mentioned that are function is where we do editorial work.
The Regional Oral History Office, the Mark Twain Papers and the Teptunus Papyrus Project
will be in the building with us.
Both the Mark Twain Papers and the Teptunus Project require continuous access to the manuscript
documents that comprise their collections and so they're going to have special vaults
in proximity to where the staff are working.
If you look at everything and there's always a million after it, how come it doesn't work?
But as it turns out in today's world there's always never enough millions to go around
and so we're like any number of the craftsmen.
Everybody has got to cover their costs and as we were mentioning the process is really
a lot of where our time goes is to keep the process, consensus driven, the best minds
in it and yet thorough and leading to a set of drawings that you can build from.
That's what we have to do but it's complicated by the number of players.
So I was put in charge of coordinating the library side of that move with the various
other parties involved.
The planners, the architects, eventually the move crews and all the various campus players
and I was representing the Bankrupt Library in those efforts.
The first thing that we did was get together some small task forces in the library to look
at various aspects of the move, getting the collections ready to be moved, creating containers
when items were fragile, things like that and also just locating where everything is
and where it was going.
I was in charge of figuring out where everything needed to go which also meant that I was basically
in charge of making sure that things went from point A to point B in an efficient manner.
Most of the guys on our crew have probably been with us now I'd say on average six years
so they've done the libraries, they've been there, we usually go from library to library.
The logistics were complex but we have a very strong devoted staff and what was really remarkable
to all of us was how strong and devoted the moving company staff were.
They took enormous pride in what they were doing and the relationship and the rapport
was phenomenal to watch.
You get chaos in every project, I mean there's always going to be an issue.
I think it was just kind of the start up and getting the staff from the library to feel
comfortable with our services.
The guys were there for about a week working side by side, I mean the first week the requirement
was everybody was going to be with a library staff and they wanted to make sure we handled
everything properly.
Everything was taken and wrapped and protected as we had discussed in the pre-move meetings
and like I said within about a week it got to the point where they weren't standing
right there.
They kind of moved away and allowed our staff to do the moves not to say that they weren't
on site but there was a trust established within that first week.
I run the guys, the crew and all the books that come in on this site make sure everything's
going alright, make sure the crew's doing everything proper.
Went through a pretty lengthy process on picking out the vendors which was NorCal.
We spent a lot of time picking out the right people and then when we brought them in we
actually had our conservation team create sort of a workshop for them.
It was about a half day where they showed them how they needed to handle the materials
moving them off of the shelves onto the carts, sort of give them an idea of what we were
looking for if there was anything wrong and the crews that they had were excellent.
Whenever anything seemed out of the ordinary they would pipe right up and say, hey, this
is not right.
So they didn't just grab the binding at the top and rip it down?
No, they did not do that.
They knew to grab the bindings at the sides.
The maps and the oversized files were one of the biggest challenges.
Not only are they very difficult to move physically but they were also in probably the farthest
darkest corner of the original building areas that had no elevator access had only narrow
doorways and stairwells that had to be negotiated.
And I think one of the one of the cleverest things that we did was work with the moving
company to design special carts so that the map files could be disassembled, safely transported
up to a staging area where they could then be reassembled and then transported.
This is a cart that we designed to move the folio collection and again as deep as the
elevator would accommodate it was about 38 inches deep which would accommodate about
98% of the folios were able to fit inside of here.
In each cart we could design to adjust the shelf height if some of the ones were oversized
or smaller.
This allowed us to get about 12 shelves worth of material on a cart versus a standard cart
with a fixed shelf.
We only had about three shelves worth of space on it.
The most complicated of the moves was moving the papyrus.
These are documents that go back 4,000 years.
Take to them bouncing back and forth 8 miles each way on interstate 80.
No curator in his right mind would ever tolerate that.
And we moved them down from central campus to here with a police escort at 5 in the morning.
We took 100 years to assemble the collection and then we had to, you know, to get it where
it was and we only had a few weeks to completely move the entire thing.
When I was doing my work on the earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco, I was looking for
specific photographs about buildings, trying to understand what happened to them.
We had records of people talking about buildings, about how the buildings had done, whether
they had survived, whether they had been damaged by the earthquake or the fire.
And the Bancroft collection was crucial.
I could find the buildings, I could write the history that hadn't been written about
how buildings had performed in the earthquake.
I could never have done that without the collection.
You're putting in those retaining walls really to keep the building from shaking?
Correct.
Are you giving them the retaining walls go in or the shear walls go in north and south?
There's two shear walls, one on the south side, one on the north side, heading east and
west.
And there are two shear walls heading north and south on the west and east side of the
building as well.
So that's going to protect the building from shaking, I understand that when you start
it, no.
Yeah, it won't stop it from shaking, but the idea is it will stop it from falling apart
when it does shake.
They used to use lath and plaster and they used to run the old mold, the plaster molds
with plaster paris and actually make a guide to make the molds.
Well, now they come out with GFRG, the architects come up with the shapes that they want, make
a drawing, we send it off, they actually make a blank mold out of the shape, it's reversed.
They make a mold to fit that glass shape and then they pour it and they're fitted together
on the ends with a tape joint and then the tapers or the plasterers take over.
You're tearing the building apart at night and you're building it back together in the
day, it's like a war zone in there and it makes it dangerous and so you have to elevate
the awareness of safety.
We have the inspector here on a daily basis because we can't afford to hold the contractor
up and we can't afford to delay anything.
30 or 40 different departments that we go to and if they have any complaints or problems
or conflicts, then they'll come back and say you can't do it on that day, you gotta wait.
And we had, we brought the mechanical equipment in last Saturday and we had to go down some
existing air shafts.
Well it was planned for the Saturday before which was Cal Day so Cal Day with 10,000 people
here and it's not the day to shut a road down and bring a big crane in.
So through that access and eruption process, somebody called and said no way so it got
moved a week and so that's the contractor issue.
If the university is doing something and it'll affect his work, then I try and communicate
the other way.
The suite of offices into which we are moving has been expanded, I mean it used to be where
we were and we really had no way to let visitors sit at this table right here because the whole
room was crowded with file cabinets, you could hardly get a chair next to it.
Five years from this first feasibility study to now.
Oftentimes there's a trigger of some terrible thing that you have to remedy like the seismic
vulnerability gives you the opportunity to do something else and I think that in the
Bancroft project that all these opportunities were taken and I think the taxpayers got
their money's worth in terms of a building that really works very well performing the
tasks that it was designed to do.
The chief responsibility of librarians is to preserve and protect their collections.
So when a library building is deemed unsafe, it seems like a simple matter to make a decision
to make it safer.
But that simple decision requires attention to building codes, environmental regulations
and architectural preservation guidelines.
Experts on everything from heavy machinery to advanced climate control systems must become
participants.
Architects, designers, movers and lawyers enter the mix and then add the staff, the
library users and the community.
Managing and administering those groups is a daunting task.
Removing and then replacing entire collections, lock, stock and barrel is not a side of library
administration that many people see.
That's why we visited one of the nation's most celebrated libraries, the Bancroft, as
it undertook and fulfilled one of the greatest challenges a library can face.
I'm Chet Gritch.
Join us next time when we visit another library on Great Libraries of the World.
Thank you.
All right.
