PASADENA – Reaching a milestone on its $148-million campus expansion, Fuller Theological Seminary celebrated the official opening Monday of the new 47,000-square-foot David Allan Hubbard Library.
Named for Fuller’s president from 1963 to 1993, the $28-million library has allowed the Protestant seminary to assemble its vast theological collection under one roof for the first time in its 62-year history.
The complete renovation and integration of the adjoining 1962-vintage McAlister Library brings the total to 90,000 square feet, providing space for 1.4 million items, including 520,000 catalogued items – 300,000 of them books – that had been stored all over the country.
Mayor Bill Bogaard called the library “the first investment in the grand Master Plan” for the core 11-acre campus.
“It’s a gift to Pasadena, a gift to the U.S.A., and a gift to the world,” Bogaard said at the opening ceremony, praising the enormous effort it took to complete the library.
Using the words of St. Anselm, an 11th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, librarian David D. Bundy called the library an example of “faith seeking understanding.”
About 300 guests, donors, Hubbard family members, faculty and students attended Monday’s opening ceremonies. Those paying tribute included Hubbard’s long-time friend, the Rev. Lloyd John Ogilvie, the Presbyterian minister who was Chaplain of the U.S. Senate from 1995 to 2003.
Ogilvie called Hubbard, who died in 1996, a “lodestar leader” of the seminary, and family members and others said his scholarship, modesty and love of books made his the ideal name to go on the library.
“He loved the life of the mind,” said Fuller Trustee John C. Ortberg, senior pastor at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church. “(The library) does not call attention to itself, and David Hubbard was the least self-promoting great leader I have known.”
The bold contemporary lines and use of glass on the three-story building – designed by Virginia-based “green” architects William McDonough and Partners – has given new visibility to the Union Street entrance to the secluded seminary.
Open to the public as well as scholars, the library has meeting spaces, lounging chairs with lap-top tables, five conference rooms, a third-floor balcony, and a temperature-controlled, two-story vault for rare books and documents.
Christianity is the prime focus, but the library has scholarly materials on Islam, Buddhism, secular culture, the arts, psychology, plus growing Asian Studies and Latin American resources and a large amount of material on-line.
Four years of planning went into the library, said Fuller President Richard J. Mouw, who recalled being one of a group “taking a bunch of shovels and pretending to dig something” to kick the project off.
In February 2008, Fuller officials announced that donors had given or pledged the full $148 million of the 20-year expansion plan’s capital campaign. Hit by the financial downturn, they later asked the city for permission to issue up to $22 million in bonds to complete key projects, including the new library.
A couple of library pledges “of several million” are still outstanding, Fuller spokesman Fred Messick said earlier, and in the meantime the shortfall is being added to the bond.
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