Bye the book.(University of Michigan's Media Union building design)

Like a hefty tome, the University of Michigan's new on-line library needed a flexible spine to support its vast contents, including computers, production facilities, multimedia classrooms and a virtual reality lab

Imagine a dance student interacting with a virtual environment in real time, or a scientist and artist using computer and visual technologies to express complex information in dynamic forms, and you get some idea of why the University of Michigan's Media Union may rewrite the book on how student libraries are used and built.

Now imagine one of the most technology-intensive university buildings in the U.S., one with no single "owner" governing its development, and no limitations on how it will be used, and you also get an idea of the challenge that the $33 million building presented its builders.

Some of the uncertainty is by design. As a pet project of former U-M president James J. Duderstadt, the steel-framed and brick-clad Media Union was envisioned as both a library and an interdisciplinary think tank, where serendipitous alliances among high technology and the applied arts and sciences would create new new forms of knowledge, and new ways of expressing it.

It was the job of Detroit-based A/E Albert Kahn & Associates to bring order and mortar to Duderstadt's vision, and to the surfeit of technologies that are Media Union's backbone. The four-story, 225,000-sq.-ft. facility, which combines the holdings of U-M's Art and Architecture libraries; as well as its Center for Parallel Computing, houses some 500 computer workstations; four interactive multimedia classrooms; video and sound production facilities; a theater; a virtual reality and animation lab; computer training facilities; a gallery and -- almost incidentally -- books. …