A Justification of Air- Conditioning in Libraries

Originally trained as a naval architect but entered the field of the building industry 26 years ago, gaining experience in both the roles of consulting engineer nnd con-tractor. In 96o he joined the practice of Steensen, Varming, Mulcahy and Partners to initiate their office in Edinburgh, and has graduated to his present status of Senior Partner in the Edinburgh Partnership. The energy crises of some eighteen months ago produced good and bad re-actions. The good re-action was the recognition, at least, by most people of the crass mis-use of energy by the industrial world over many decades. The bad re-action was the ill-considered immediate assumption of abandoning the use of alleged high-energy consuming systems in buildings. This paper endeavours to persuade readers that an air-conditioning concept is correct for a properly designed library and that such an installation need not be wasteful of energy. It is the substance of a talk given before a SCONUL meeting in November 1974. Let me declare my position at the outset. I am, and have been for some time, a confirmed air-conditioning man. Having been involved with some twelve or thirteen libraries, I have had no reason to change my initial opinion; and in fact my experience has only confirmed my original view. Indeed, as many readers will l know, the air-conditioning with which I was concerned in the Edinburgh University Library was designed and installed notwithstanding the fact that the powers-that-be officially did not recognize that air-conditioning should be applied to libraries and thus, obviously, did not provide any money for such an instal-lation. Fortunately the sheer size of the Edinburgh University Library, together with the UGC method of arriving at their expenditure limit, combined with a sympathetic design from the architect and with a client who was willing to go along with the air-conditioning being paid out of the normal funds, allowed us to get air-conditioning-albeit in such circumstances a minimal provision-and this proved to be not as we may have wished at the time and certainly not as satis-factory as the design of subsequent libraries would now show. Nevertheless, this at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on March 6, 2016lis.sagepub.comDownloaded from 20