Whangarei's Old Library celebrates 75th jubilee

Friends and guardians of the Old Library have thrown a week-long party to celebrate the building's 75th jubilee. Events included storytelling, addresses about the building's architectural significance, 1930s music and dancing, a jazz concert and, tonight, a black-tie gala party. It's all part of the life, entertainment and enlightenment the much-loved, award-winning building has enjoyed since 1936. Lindy Laird reports.

THE former Whangarei Public Library is a brick of a building - an unfussy but elegant edifice planted gloriously firmly on the ground.

A harsh view of the Old Library's austere exterior might be that it's only a few art deco accents away from being about as lovely as the town's water treatment plant, or similar utility buildings.

But no, the late art deco period, 1936, building has presence and integrity - reasons among others why the attractive building's designers, Whangarei architects Horace Massey and Alfred Morgan, were awarded a gold medal by the New Zealand Institute of Architects in 1938.

Its integrity somehow survived being assaulted in the reactionary, ad hoc manner public officials were want to do. Between 1964 and 2006, the Old Library was modernised, extended, mezzanined, de-mezzanined, partitioned, de-partitioned, outgrown, decommissioned and recommissioned.

In the process of revolving-door renovations, in 1968 the building literally lost its magnificent revolving doors - "unsafe, inconvenient and expensive to maintain". And it lost its head, literally, when the main chamber's large glass skylight was dismantled to protect library users from the sky falling in.

In attempts to grow the space to fit the needs, the landmark building's essential rectitude could easily have turned to wrecktitude.

Old Library Ltd, the present caretakers of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust-listed Category 2 building, are on a mission to restore the big, deco-styled skylight, somehow. In the meantime, restoration includes the mezzanine floor being reduced to a balcony, and the upgrade includes welcome new toilets and kitchen facilities.

In its life the building, the front facade of which remained relatively unscarred, went through at least seven major alterations. One of the more controversial - and bold - was the two-storey, pre-cast concrete, curved-wall addition of the early 1980s, designed by Peter McNaught.

In the late 1990s it was finally decided the building could be stretched no more. The city's impressive new library - also receiving a NZIA award - was opened in 2006.

The Old Library, two years young at the time, had been lauded in Home and Building in February 1939 for its "simple lines and excellent proportions, warm-toned bricks relieved by cast-stone moulded facings and surrounds ..." Interior features included electric tube heating, frosted glass screens, and bookshelves "arranged in radial lines converging upon the control desk, which allows proper control with a minimum of supervision".

The building, funded through a public works loan of £7500, was officially opened on November 12, 1936. In its lead story that day the Northern Advocate waxed lyrical about "a most outstanding addition to the architectural beauty of Whangarei".

Library committee chairman Mr A.T. Brainsby, the article said, had been "the fountainhead of inspiration and for him, as to other literary-minded citizens, the completed fact, as it stands today a pride for all to see, a treasure house of education and amusement ... a golden dream come true".

In 2011, now the Old Library Arts Centre, an iconic building that retains its role as the city's cultural treasure house lives up to that eloquent 75-year-old description. By Lindy Laird