Bigfork Library design team had a focus on ethical building practices

The new Bigfork branch of Flathead County Library — set to open August 6 — is one of a series of projects worldwide that aims to draw awareness toward unethical practices in the building industry, according to the firm behind the branch’s architecture.

The Design For Freedom movement is an initiative started by the Grace Farms Foundation, a nonprofit which runs Grace Farms, a “center for culture and collaboration” based in New Canaan, Connecticut, according to its website. The movement requires selected pilot projects to ethically source at least five materials for the construction.  

The Bigfork library is an anomaly among the other pilot projects, which include the Carnegie Ethics Hub in New York City and the Karsh Institute for Democracy at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Cushing-Terrell Interior Designer Jessica Murray said the Bigfork design offered a look into how a rural, smaller community would tackle a Design For Freedom project.   

“When this project kind of came across my desk, there were a couple of reasons why I thought this might make a great pilot project. One being, it’s a public building, it’s a library,” Murray said. “It’s an organization I’m familiar with, I brought my kid there when she was a baby. It was already something I was passionate about.”  

For the Bigfork Library project, the Cushing-Terrell team identified seven products they could ethically source that also fit within the budget and staff’s requests. This included the building’s carpet tile, the resilient floor in the break room, all the door hardware, acrylic panels used in the children’s area, paint, materials used on the casework and lastly, textiles and components that make up several of the furniture pieces.    

Murray said sustainability became an important factor in building design more than a decade ago. The focus began with how materials are made and how those processes affect the planet. It also eventually grew to include how those materials affect human health if people are regularly exposed to them, according to Murray.   

“It’s one thing to look at a material and say, ‘Is this manufactured in the U.S.?’ But breaking that down and going, you know, ‘The gypsum wallboard that’s on walls of every building, what are the ingredients in that and where are they coming from?’ ... So, it’s kind of breaking it down to that next step,” Murray said.   

Ethically sourced components of the materials used are not the only deciding factor. Forced labor and other forms of exploitative labor practices happen throughout the supply chain. Learning how the materials are created is also important to examine, Murray said.   

She said the involvement with Design For Freedom raises awareness about these issues on a local level, alerting the community, the client and the contractors involved to this humanitarian crisis in the industry.   

“Secondly, the research itself involves digging deep with the manufacturers of products you’re specifying and getting them to hopefully be transparent and provide documentation to show that their supply chain is ethical,” Murray said.   

Murray, who was also the interior designer for the Wachholz College Center, said a team of around 10 people tackled designing the library around the beginning of 2023. It had been five years since the ImagineIF Foundation bought the Ark Building from Bethany Lutheran Church, and after a pandemic and concerns about the property transfer to Flathead County, the Bigfork Library project was on track.  

Murray said the first meeting with the client team was exciting —  they were going to build a modern library that would accommodate new teen events and activities like gardening classes, as well as traditional library programming like story time.   

The new building will be an upgrade for the library in terms of size and capacity for offerings. The former Bigfork branch was housed in part of the Bigfork Art and Cultural Center, where staff had around 1,400 square feet of space to operate. The new building is 6,000 square feet and features an outdoor area behind the building, as well as ample space inside for more book stacks and spaces to work or read.   

One challenge was staying within the budget, due to the project relying on fundraising. The overall fundraising goal for the project is $3.2 million, according to the ImagineIF Foundation’s website.  

Murray said there’s also always challenges when working with an existing building.   

“We started with essentially a big rectangular space that just had nothing too special going on within it. So how to create a bit of a dynamic feel within a space like that was sort of the initial challenge. Also modernizing the space, giving it a bit of a distinction of it from the church buildings that are still existing nearby,” Murray said.   

The concept Murray came up with for the library was inspired by its location, nestled in the woods near the Swan River and Flathead Lake. She said she also stewed on the idea of libraries acting as bridges in communities — serving both the young and old and connecting people to technology and knowledge.   

There’s also the fact that most patrons will cross the bridge on Montana 35 to get to the new library, and that area residents take pride in the nearby one lane bridge that has made for a charming scene in downtown for 117 years.   

“We started with, ‘How can we bring this analogy of a bridge and a river to the concept of the interior?’ So when you walk in the front door, there’s sort of this abstracted bridge made out of some wood elements [overhead]. And what was really cool is we were able to use the beams that created that bridge to bring power across the facility,” Murray said.   

There are natural wood elements throughout the building, as well as the signature Flathead County Library color of orange combined with blue and green. Though they wanted patrons to feel like the interior was an extension of the nature outside, they didn’t want to be too literal, Murray said.   

She pulled from the visual of walking up on a bridge in the woods, where someone might notice the sunlight cascading through the trees and sparkles from the water below.   

Using slat walls and windows throughout the building, designers aimed to emulate the effect of sunlight dancing through trees. A mobile stretches across the ceiling, which Murray compared to an abstracted river.   

“Not everyone that walks in that space is going to necessarily draw those connections, but they’re going to feel that experience of sort of that lightness and sparkle,” Murray said.   

The theme reverberates in the landscaping outside, which is purposefully sparse in the front and more elaborate in the back. As patrons head to the outdoor space behind the library, they might notice bridge elements stamped into the concrete.  

Murray said she enjoyed tackling a project with constraints and working to find solutions. She said library and foundation staff gave her creative freedom to take design risks, and that it was fulfilling to work on a project that is an investment for the community.   

“My favorite little design element has to be those kids’ windows, with the different shapes and colors — they just feel so fun,” Murray said. “I’ve had two little girls now that have spent time in the Kalispell library, so I just feel it’s fun to be able to create a space that I know other kids will get to enjoy and experience there.”