Utah Book Month: West Jordan Public Library

I lived most of my life in West Jordan, Utah, until recently. As a kid one of my favorite things to do was go to the library. The idea that you could take a stack of books home without having to pay for them, and have a full month to read them, was sort of like Utopia to me. I couldn't get enough of books. When I got my first library card, with my name on it, it was like someone had handed me an unlimited credit card that I never had to pay back.

In my hometown of West Jordan the library was located in a small area of a strip mall. Then, in 1986 when I was just getting married, they opened a new library that I thought was large at 12,500 square feet. It was shaped like a wide V which made it feel larger than it actually was. It had rows and rows of books. It had computers, something that no one had in their houses. It had a copy machine, which I found endlessly fascinating, especially when those fresh sheets of printed paper came off, warm and worthy of being pressed against your nose for a good whiff. They even had a laminating machine! To me that was a wonder.

The "new" West Jordan library, built in 1986

In 2012 West Jordan City opened a new library, a state-of-the-art building built with world class energy saving features, minimal environmental impact, and made for conservation of resources. It's a "green" building - and I'm not talking about the color. If I thought the original library was huge, it had nothing on this 71,665 square foot library. 20,000 of that is pure library space, with the rest taken up by conference rooms and administrative offices for the Salt Lake County Library System.

Viridian West Jordan library, opened in 2012

It has 26 computers, plus 4 more in the childrens area, over 150,000 items, free Wi-fi and plenty of "hanging out" space.

The cost of this amazing place was somewhere in the neighborhood of $17.9M but it meets LEED (Leadership in Energy Efficient Design) standards.

If you ever are in the area, even if you don't have a library card, I highly suggest stopping by this amazing building, stepping inside the doors, and though copied papers no longer smell like they used to, you can still smell the books. So take a good whiff.

The Viridian West Jordan library is located at 8030 South 1825 West and is open M-Th 10-9 F-S 10-6.

 All the specs, library history info, floor plans, as well as plenty more pics of the new library, can be found at the following links:
http://www.slcolibrary.org/gl/glal/librarywestjordan.htm
http://buildingdashboard.net/slcolibrary/#/slcolibrary/westjordan/
http://co.slcolibrary.org/libraries/wjoPictures.cfm
http://co.slcolibrary.org/pdf/westJordanHistory.pdf
http://co.slcolibrary.org/pdf/wjoFloorPlans.pdf
http://www.viridiancenter.org/fa/index.htm