CSU Channel Islands Library Wins Design Award

California State University Channel Islands in Camarillo, California announces that the John Spoor Broome Library has been named a winner in the California Construction magazine Best of 2008 awards program. The Library won the Award of Merit in the Outstanding Architectural Design category. An independent jury of industry experts in design and construction judged more than 140 nominated projects in a variety of categories.

The 50 winners of this year’s awards will be featured in the December 2008 issue of California Construction. This statewide competition annually recognizes construction and design excellence in Northern and Southern California.

The jury, which met in mid-September, awarded points to construction submissions based on criteria including project management, overcoming challenges of the job, overall excellence in architectural or engineering design, innovation, safety and the contribution to the community and/or the construction industry, among other criteria.

“The University is honored to receive this award honoring architectural design. The openness of the library as designed by Foster’s office has created a very accessible library, which supports the CSU mission of providing access to higher education,” said Deborah Wylie, Associate Vice President of Operations, Planning & Construction at CSU Channel Islands.
The John Spoor Broome Library is a 137,000-square foot facility on the California State University Channel Islands campus. Designed by Lord Norman Foster and completed in 2008, the Broome Library is an integration of an existing structure—Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival architecture built in the1950s—with clean lines and the open space of glass, metal, and concrete.

The new library, with its translucent glass ceiling that provides natural lighting for much of the building and its outdoor reflecting pool, houses 75,000 bound volumes, and more than 180,000 electronic books along with CDs, DVDs, and VHS; 32,000 digital images of art history, biology, environmental science; and current and historic campus photographs. The facility has the capacity of 250,000 to 300,000 bound volumes and can accommodate more than 1,800 users at a time.