After nearly 40 years, the Village of Oak Park will get a new library with an expanded space that reflects the changing needs of the community.
When Oak Park Public Library officials decided to build a new modern library rather than expand the 39-year-old building a second time, it created a series of challenges to be overcome by Nagle Hartray Danker Kagan McKay Architect Planners, of Chicago, and general contractor Meyne Company, a division of Bulley and Associates LLC, of Chicago.
“This one is harder, more complicated,” said Bill Reininga, superintendent of Meyne, about the 100,000-sq.-ft. (9,290 sq m) building that was started in May 2002. It is about three times the size of the existing building. It expanded beyond the lot and across a residential street.
Ideally, Reininga said, crews would have installed a tower crane to solve the lack of space, but it was not a reasonable cost for a three-story building.
The project left little room for material deliveries and the crews had to park off site. The $18.7-million cost of the project includes the demolition of the existing building, and the recycling of some materials and asbestos abatement. The cost also consists of the removal of part of Grove Avenue and utilities.
“There is no room from property line to property line,” said Tim Puntillo, Meyne senior project manager. The project trailer is on the west side of the building, continuing on adjoining First United Church of Oak Park property. Reininga noted that the church has been very cooperative throughout the job.
The lot remains a prime location for the library. Besides space for its collections, the library lacked parking, which an addition would not adequately solve. The new building has underground parking for approximately 100 spaces.
The library also is under a time crunch. “They turned a 16-month project into a 14-month one,” said Puntillo. The project is on schedule for the July completion. The library is temporarily housed in a vacated auto parts store and the lease ends this summer.
Early on in the design, the library discovered that the desired building would exceed the size of the existing lot. The Village of Oak Park accommodated the library by converting Grove Avenue into a cul-de-sac. As a result, the room that might have existed along the street now stops at the trees in Scoville Park, the Village’s main square.
Reininga said that this is where crews had to deliver materials and enter with equipment once the exterior was up. “We were able to clear some of the trees to make room,” he said, “but it was still a relatively tight space. ”
When winter arrived, workers wrapped the building for warmth. This limited the supply points to the scaffolding. It could be fed only from one direction, leaving the Crouch Walker Corp. masons to wheel in the brick, mortar and stone from one end of the building.
The exterior design reflects the “monumentality” of the buildings around it, said Eric Penney, architect and project engineer of Nagle. One of those buildings includes the Unity Temple church, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, across the street. The building’s design, both inside and out, reflects the cultural diversity of the community. It includes space for its special collection of Frank Lloyd Wright and for Ernest Hemingway events.
Penney said that once the building went up to the park, they redesigned that side to create a more “organic” look. “It was a real opportunity,” Penney said. “It only came up when we were trying to give [the library] their program.”
The east side will feature large glass windows to look out onto the park. It features several angles to the walls. The roof peaks at several points as the wall sweeps back from south to north. It is built of steel and wood, with a copper roof. All the pieces, wood and the steel, were precut and delivered to the site to be assembled.
The roof “came together like a jigsaw puzzle,” Reininga said.
This is in contrast to the mostly concrete construction of the building.
The work on the foundation began by driving steel sheeting around the perimeter before digging out. This was to prevent the collapse of the dirt wall and undermining the adjoining buildings foundations.
Meyne Co. used several techniques to pour the 7,660 cu. yd. (5,857 cu m) of concrete.
Instead of a tower crane, Meyne Co. used a 55-ton (50 t) crane from Royal Crane Service of Bridgeview, IL, and a 110-ton (100 t) crane from Central Contractors Service of Chicago. They worked out as well as could be expected. It was close, however, when the chillers were installed. The boom on the crane stretched to its limit to reach the location of the units, Reininga said.
While the concrete deck pours were easily in reach, the cranes could not reach all the column forms.
Reininga said he searched for a while before he found McCann Conveyor of Addison, IL, which supplied a mobile conveyor system that used a hopper to convey the concrete to the top of the form.
“It was slow,” Reininga said, but it got the job done.
