ABSTRACT
This chapter examines design responsibility for environmental and operational concerns in an attempt to identify the application of certain emerging standards for design practice. As professionals, librarians and architects distanced themselves from the library users for whom they were ostensibly making provisions. Both architects and librarians promoted the importance of a library site being open to natural light. J. L Smithmeyer, architect of Allegheny Library, noted 'that the proper selection of a site should be high and dry'. The availability of electric light emerged in close parallel with the case study library buildings. As such, progress in the performance of artificial light within these buildings traced a critical path of technological development and economic feasibility. A requirement for 'perfect lighting' was written into the Carnegie Corporation's 'Instructions to Architects' as early as 1902. The reading rooms of the libraries at Wednesbury, Cradley Heath, Walsall, West Bromwich, Dudley, Blackheath and Tipton all share the feature of a curved ceiling.
