San Mateo Library

August 28th, 2006

Webomatica Today we went to the grand opening of the new San Mateo Public Library. It’s a pretty impressive building at three stories tall and a reported 90,000 square feet. There was a pretty large crowd, free food, and entertainment, leaving me quite impressed that there would be this many people showing up to check out a library.

Most impressive are the comfortable areas for reading, a snack bar, and a huge kid’s area complete with a kid auditorium complete with round sunny windows. There are a lot of neat little touches throughout, from the slightly curved lamp shades (that rotate to direct light to your book) to the plugs recessed into desks and tables for plugging in a laptop to use the wireless internet. Checking out books is kind of freaky, as you lie them on a flat surface and some kind of scanner (RFID?) identifies which books you have. It seems like the space was designed for the future in mind and what would make a library attractive to people in this day and age of mega-bookstores and video games.

The building is also an exercise in green architecture, with an emphasis on natural lighting. It was built largely of recycled materials and is designed to be energy efficient, down to the waterless urinals and “flyash” concrete. I don’t really get a lot of the technology that went into building it, but even to be aware of such eco-friendly potentials is good advertising for such concepts. Maybe it is possible that such future-forward thinking can be a reality.

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