pclover1974-blog

[pclover1974-blog]

Here’s an image of my hand drawing of the PCL from a bird’s eye view. Right in front of it are two heavily trafficked street, the more important one though is Speedway, which when campus is operating at full capacity, can easily have hundreds if not thousands of students walking on it at any given time. 

[pclover1974-blog]

So this is what the PCL looks like from the top, and as you can see, it is in the center of a very large urban area. This library gets a lot of traffic daily (or at least it did before the times of COVID lol). It’s located very conveniently next to a very popular dorm, which is the Jester dorm, so it gets really busy on school days. 

[pclover1974-blog]

So I have been inside the building before (obviously), and on first impressions, it was really impressive. The ceilings on the first floor was really high, it was nice and bright, and really cozy because there's a coffee shop like right inside the door. My roomate, Thomas, has also been inside the building before, but his first impressions were more along the lines of "this is a good study space". I love books so I very obviously loved the fact that it was a library. However, at night, because most of the lighting is bright white fluorescent light, it does have a somewhat sterile feeling to it, which is good if your are trying to stay awake and not fall asleep, but bad because it kinda feels unwelcoming when there is no natural light coming in.

[pclover1974-blog]

So this is one picture of the interior of the PCl. This particular picture was taken on the first floor and it features one of my favorite and imo most aesthetic thing in the building. The wall of inspirational quotes. I often sit in the area that is right next to this wall because I really do enjoy looking at it once in a while. It just honestly gives me some inspiration or gives my eyes something nice to look at after looking down at my laptop for like hours on end.

[pclover1974-blog]

Bartlett Cocke cool facts

1. He was in his 20s-30s in the Great Depression and, as such, a lot of his desins pulled reflected that era (gloomy, not over joyous, imposing, etc).

2. His first major project was designing a more efficient downtown plaza for the Alamo Plaza in San Antonio, which is also the town he grew up in. He later on went to design churches, malls, and some of his biggest projects were for universities.

3. As his name grew, so did his repertoire and design ideas. He was appointed the director for the Board of the Texas Society of Architects from 1944 to 1945. His works received many recognitions and awards and in the 1980s, he became the first alumnus to be honored with a professorship at the University of Texas at Austin. 

N/A. “Bartlett Cocke: An Inventory of His Papers.” University of Texas Libraries, 2002, legacy.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utaaa/00055/aaa-00055.html.

[pclover1974-blog]

The Energy System for the PCL

This is a really long technical report and i know that most of us aren’t super patient, but bear with me here ya’ll. So this paper talks all about the HVAC system of the PCL. One of the biggest points in the paper is that the PCL was made before they installed any form of energy monitoring, so they couldn’t easily see how much energy was being used. To fix that, they came up with a method to calculate how much energy was being used so they know if what they do in the future to the building will save them money or not. The way that they figure out energy cost consists of them using pre-retrofit data and post-retrofit data to create a model that compares energy usage and cost over the span of any amount of time, which was generally one full week.

Katipamula, Srinivas, and David Claridge. “Simulation of the Post-Retrofit Thermal Energy Use for the Perry-Castaneda Library Building with the Use of Simplified System Models.” Texas A&M University, Texas A&M, 1991, pp. 1–32.

https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/2101/ESL-TR-91-12-02.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

[pclover1974-blog]

The Library’s Jewish and Hebrew collection

As should be obvious, this library holds a huge collection of books, scripts, maps, and other forms of physical information and data. One of these collections is the Judaica and Hebraica collection, which include over a 2000 collection of English, German, and Hebrew titles written from circa 1800s to mid 1900s. This collections also consists of one of if not the largest collection of Yiddish materials (reading, audio, etc) found in the United States. Much of the titles found in this collection are nonfiction, though some are also fiction. Overall, this collection is a great start for one who plans on studying or interested in the lives, cultures, and history of the Jewish and Israelite communities.

Green, Holly. “A Research Guide to the Judaica & Hebraica Collection   at the Perry‐Castañeda Library The University of Texas at Austin for Hebrew Studies.” University of Texas at Austin, The School of Information, 2009, pp. 1–22. Accessed September 15, 2020

https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/7859/hebrew-studies-research-guide.pdf?sequence=3

[pclover1974-blog]

So this is one angle of the of the outside of the library. The building was designed with Brutalism as the main movement. This Brutalist movement consists of buildings generally made out of concrete, and the exterior designed to be imposing, with straight lines, large walls, small windows, and just generally a more distant and cold feel. This movement was popularized around the 1970s and has been used to design mostly government buildings. It quickly fell out of favor because of how unsustainable it was and how unwelcoming it felt. The most common materials used in the PCL is concrete and steel.

N/A. “Brutalism.” Brutalism - Designing Buildings Wiki, 24 June 2016, accessed September 15, 2020

 www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Brutalism

[pclover1974-blog]

So obviously the main reason for this building’s existence is to provide resources for the public, academia or otherwise. That means that one of the biggest user of the library is students and people who are in academia. But its also used as a hang out spot, study spot, eating spot, and sometimes even just a good place to hide from harsh Texas sun. 

TEX Libris – the Magazine of the University of Texas Libraries: 3–4. Fall 2017, accessed September 15, 2020

https://www.lib.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/utl-nl-fall2017.pdf

[pclover1974-blog]

So this is the start of my blog for the PCL library. First off, its full name is actually Perry Castaneda Library, and it is located very close to where I live and go to school, which is the University of Texas at Austin. It was designed by Bartlett Cocke and completed in 1977. Bit of interesting note, if you use your imagination and look at it the right way, you can kinda see that its shaped like Texas, although this wasn’t actually intentional. Still cool tho.

Tracé Etienne-Gray, “Perry-Castañeda Library,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed September 14, 2020, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/perry-castaneda-library.