HomeMy WebLinkAbout10/22/2025 Item 4a, Schmidt
Richard Schmidt <
To:Advisory Bodies
Subject:CHC Agenda correspondence: Master list comments
Sept. 29, 2025
Dear Cultural Heritage Committee:
In response to your call for expanding the master list of historic properties, I have both a general
observation about “lacks” and one nomination that’s long overdue for listing.
General observation. The city’s attention to documenting, honoring and preserving mid-century era
buildings is lacking. There are many that are worthy, many more that were worthy but were lost due to
lagging recognition of what’s special about that era. One particularly sad loss, in my opinion, is that only
one of the many little streamline moderne gas stations we had not long ago remains. (The sole remainder
is the one at Archer/Higuera.) These diminutive buildings speak to a time when automobiling was both
adventure and an innocent activity, and spiffy industrial design was valued. I should hope that in
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amending your planning focus thought will be given to what categories of 20 century vernacular
structures should be honored to keep us connected to our actual lived daily pasts rather than
mythologized facsimiles thereof.
A nomination: City of San Luis Obispo Library, Palm/Morro.
This is an excellent underappreciated mid-century public building, of a type of which we have no others.
It is also an excellent example of the post World War II modernization of ideas about what a library
should look like and how it should approach the broader public.
When this library was built it was a city library, not a consolidated county library. It is a prominent
statement of the expansive democratic cultural optimism of the post WWII USA. (Other aspects of this
cultural blooming include, of course, the GI bill, which vastly expanded college opportunities, and the
massive home-building and invention of mass housing to make up for the near-total construction stop
during the war.)
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For libraries the idea was that the turn of the century paradigm of monumental buildings on physical and
cultural pedestals no longer fit, and thus designs that welcomed customers at street level, that ditched
the stuffiness and darkness of the old libraries, were the new ideal.
And so the movement included well-published exemplars like the downtown Cincinnati Public Library,
with its walk-in-off-the-sidewalk entry (more like a department store’s welcoming, it was said, than like a
traditional library’s tiers of stairs to be climbed to get inside), a place of warmth rather than stiffness
inside, open air courtyards, and a simple esthetic even as it made reference to context by using
traditional red brick, albeit in unfamiliar modernist ways.
Our SLO library is a fine example of how this new idea of what a library building should be could be
scaled down to a small town’s needs. Comparing its modesty and understatement with the pomp and
formality of its predecessor, the Carnegie at Broad/Monterey, is a good place to start to understand the
translation of theory to built practice.
A few of the things to note:
• The overall feeling of welcoming adopts modernized simplified characteristics of the California
bungalow, which was the dominant context of that part of town. The building forms say “bungalow” – the
low slope broad roofs, the building massing.
• The entry is at street level, up a walkway which in scale seems domestic rather than institutional.
There’s no intent to impress with monumentalism, but to be welcoming.
• Materials are familiar and domestic, not monumental. It’s interesting that the newer city-county library
has reverted to a more monumental façade that declares importance rather than a welcoming warmth.
• Like good bungalow homes, the library admits plentiful natural light, and uses glass to make indoor-
outdoor visual connections.
• Inside there are some wonderful characteristic modern details probably missed by most visitors, like a
post-to-floor structural connection that uses a steel plate inserted through the post’s bottom center and
fastened with a bolt so the connection is nearly unnoticeable.
There’s much more that can be said about this library, but this brief statement should suffice for now.
This place is a much-neglected gem deserving of master list status.
Sincerely,
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Richard Schmidt, architect/historian
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