Summary

From all the feedback we have received to the changes that we have made to our original plans and designs, we have finally created a final design that we are satisfied with. We feel as though we achieved what we set out to accomplish when we began to redesign the library. The new library is an eco-friendly and sustainable building that is now more efficient and serves a greater purpose.

The current layout of the Mira Loma library is very inefficient because the rooms are very cluttered due to the fact that the building is just simply too small. Some huge problems with the current library are that there are too many books to fit onto what little available shelving space there is, there is no proper storage room for unused textbooks, and the media room houses too many computers which creates a problem when a full class of students try to use the computers but find it difficult with lack of space. With our new design, we have eliminated those problems by creating a larger space between two floors and opened the building up to accommodate more bookshelves and people. We have moved the media room to the second floor and have also added a large room for the librarian’s to store unused textbooks. The bookshelves have been placed around the first floor for the extra space so students can carefully walk around the bookshelves without knocking anything over.

In the current library state, we noticed that the aesthetics of the library are not appealing to the eye and does not “invite” one in to the building for studying or to just relax. There are hardly any windows in the building so not only is energy being wasted from having the lights on most of the time but due to the lack of light, the darkness makes the building look smaller than it actually is. Fortunately, with our new design, we have added bigger and more windows to create a spacious and open area. Looking at our sketchup model and our scaled model, the big windows do make the building seem bigger than it really is.

We added a huge aspect to our design that is not included in the current Mira Loma library. This is our garden. Our garden is our main focal point on how we are going to involve the community into our new building. The community can rent out plots to grow their own flowers. This will also add to the aesthetics of our building as a whole because the garden is a scent and ornamental garden which means that the only thing that is going to be grown in the garden are flowers and plants. When the weather is nice, students also have the option of sitting outside in the garden in our designated seating area.

We believe that our new design functions better as a whole than the current library because we took the problems that we saw and changed them to something that everyone can utilize. Not only that, but we made our building eco-friendly and sustainable so the environment will not be impacted as much.