 Construction of the new main library in Civic Center has progressed steadily during the past 12 months. After a joyful topping out ceremony, the age-old builder's tradition of placing a tree atop a building after the last beam of the framework has been installed, the business of erecting the exterior walls was begun. Recast exterior panels of light-gray granite were fabricated to match the color of the surrounding Civic Center buildings. The architecture of the new main library integrates a classic Beaux-Arts style compatible with the public heart of the Civic Center with a more contemporary configuration facing Market Street. When finished, the new main library will complete the Civic Center blueprint conceptualized by Daniel Burnham in 1912. The new main construction schedule was put off by approximately 30 days due to the severe weather conditions and rain of this past winter. The new main opening day ceremony is now scheduled for mid-April of next year. Meanwhile, work continues on the interior of the 375,000 square foot building which features a dramatic 50-foot diameter five-story atrium topped by a large circular skylight that connects the library's various sections and distributes natural light throughout the building. Workers are busy installing the metal stud framing and sheetrock of the interior spaces. And installation of the elevators and electrical conduit and fixtures continues. The various special collection rooms are beginning to take shape and interior mill work is expected to begin this month. When the new main library is completed, a total of 77 subcontracting firms will have participated in the construction of the building which is being constructed by the general contracting firm of Huber Hunt and Nichols Incorporated. The main library will open to the public in less than a year. And plans are already being made for a special grand opening celebration for what is truly going to be a civic treasure and a state-of-the-art library. The Art Enrichment Ordinance passed in San Francisco in 1969 mandated that up to 2% of the total cost of construction in all new civic projects could go towards art and arts administration. The San Francisco Arts Commission and the Bureau of Architecture determined that $1.5 million would pay for four of the city's newest civic art treasures which will be housed in the new main library scheduled to open in April 1996. Prominent New York artist Alice Acock, in town to check on the progress of her two new main library pieces, met up with at the public library at the Blakeway Metalworks to discuss her grand stairway conical structure and the companion hanging sculpture which will be nearby. Principal architects for the new main library, James Ingo Freed of Pay Cobb and Freed, and Kathy Simon of Simon, Martin, Beggy, Winklestein, Morris also share their thoughts on artists and architects in the design process. This building probably has more involvement with artists than most buildings do. There is an art program here that dealt with art and architecture and we took it seriously. That is, we do not want plop art which is art added to architecture. We don't want static art. We want to bring the artist in and work with the artist and integrating some of his artist's thought into the building itself. And I think so far it's been highly successful. It's the most integrated work I've seen. We're very lucky because we have four incredible artists. One is Alice Acock, a sculptor from New York who's doing a stair in the Great Reading Room from level five to level four, and also a piece that's like the invention of a spiraling stair that hangs above the third floor. From the beginning there is a very strong sense that I should engage the building and also engage it in a kind of functional way which was the challenge in order to put something that would feel that it needed to be there and not just be a sculpture. So that was the sort of challenge. And then the other challenge was that there weren't, I mean quite literally, there weren't a lot of spaces. Now I'm talking in a practical manner that something could take up because everything is really going to be devoted to the space of the library, so to speak. So in essence the challenge was not to take up very much floor space at all and make something that felt like it was really necessary at the same time get in all the things that are unnecessary that art is all about. I mean it isn't about practicalities. So all of those things. But I would say that to some degree my earlier work was about making fantasy stares and not so much pragmatic stares but fantasy stares and there were a lot of sort of what I would call giving you the bird's eye view where you cut something on a skew and you can look into it and have the plan view as well as the three-dimensional structure. So in a sense this was kind of using a lot of the preliminary work that I had done over the years for temporary installations and things like that and trying to bring it together and make it make a more permanent statement. But it's interesting because this is when we started the project Ingo said to me oh this is fraught with dangers working with these artists. It's hard to have it work out and I thought naively and because I love artists so much oh it's just going to be great. And it is fraught with perils, you're right. And it's very, very difficult. Artists when they make something they get finished whereas architects we're willing to go on and on forever. So one of the problems is how do you allow change to happen in the building and let the artists accommodate it or make them accommodate it? Artists have a very different time factor than architects. An artist's time sense is about a fifth of that of an architect. So that a very few artists are comfortable with saying this is my artwork and documenting it and putting out to bid and instruction away any part of the building is done. Most artists like to be reactive. They like to see the building, they like to see the space, go ahead and do it. And even when they are brought along to do something where they disappear here the idea was not that the artists disappear but to integrate with the building. Sometimes the artist disappears and just their sensibility remains in the building. There's been an enormous amount of organization which is very, very different and interaction. It's extremely different than what I would do in the studio. That sense how things have to be. Drawings made four or five years in advance of when they're going to happen and all sorts of things like that. I think that the public part of this also in all the aspects of safety and everything like that that would never happen in making an art piece for just a piece of art for a museum. I mean there was tremendous going around getting things to the sixteenth of an inch in terms of all sorts of codes and the reason we're putting this together today is A, I don't think any of us have seen it all together. I'm going to be designing this portion right in here. It's designed but we're going to try and mock it up so they can make it. This is part of the structure that was not done on computers and all of that that we're just going to be doing hopefully here today. I would say this is the structural stairs and this is the fantasy stairs that we're doing today and this is a kind of fantasy stairs and this fan section which is not up, has not been completed yet is another play on stairs. So essentially what we're doing with now is all the sort of playful aspects of the work. It's fun to work with artists. They start from the vision of the whole and go into the little stuff like how does it work? There's some of the idea of how they can work and go into the little stuff like what is the vision of the whole. I think that as an artist you take what you hope are your hunches, your experience, your attempt to arrive at something very authentic just in terms of what people's responses will be and that's what I try to do. And I sort of like, for instance, I have the sense that people will hopefully, if this pulls off have a sense of something that's whirling and hurling and tipped and that they will get a strong physical psychological experience because that's the way human beings are made. Check out at the Public Library in the months to come for a look at the thoughts and the work of the other New Main Library artists as they prepare for the grand opening in April 1996.