The Astoria public library reopened in the fall of 2025 after a major renovation. When discussions about remodeling the library surfaced, it begged the question: What exactly does a community need from a public space? The same kinds of questions were posed when the original library was designed.
Trailblazing Astorian architect Ebba Wicks Brown, the first woman in Oregon to receive an architectural license, designed the original Brutalist-style building in 1967. Rachel Jensen, the executive director of the Lower Columbia Preservation Society, joins us to discuss Brown’s legacy and the ways the library’s remodel honors the original vision while serving the modern needs of its coastal community.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Astoria Library was constructed nearly 60 years ago. It was created by the trailblazing Astorian architect Ebba Wicks Brown, who was the first woman in Oregon to receive an architectural license by examination. This past fall, the Brutalist-style building reopened after an extensive renovation, one that achieved a kind of architectural magic trick. It doubled the usable public space with minimal changes to the exterior.
Rachel Jensen has researched Ebba Wicks Brown and the broader built environment of Clatsop County. She is the executive director of the Lower Columbia Preservation Society, and she joins us now. Rachel Jensen, welcome to the show.
Rachel Jensen: Thank you very much for having me. Good afternoon.
Miller: So I noted that this original library was designed by Ebba Wicks Brown. Who was she?
Jensen: Ebba Wicks Brown was born and raised here in Astoria, and she was the daughter of John Wicks, a very prominent architect here in Astoria. Most people who have older Colonial Revival homes love to say they have a Wicks home. So she was raised in a family, her dad had three daughters. And she was particularly interested in architecture that her father was doing, and so she actually worked with him as a child, and then also went on to study architecture formally. She then came back to Astoria and worked with her father. They went back to school again at Cranbrook Academy near Detroit, Michigan, where she met her husband. They came back and continued to work here in Astoria.
Miller: How would you describe her style in comparison to her father’s?
Jensen: I see some similarities because John Wicks liked experimenting. He liked experimenting with new materials and new styles. He did not stick to one style and she was very similar. She was not a one-style architect. So it was interesting to see, as I look back at what she worked on with her father and then with her husband again later, that it’s always about new abilities to make workable spaces out of things like the location, the limitations. She left her mind wide open. I think her father did too. They worked well together in that way. But she always seemed to be open, never wanted to close the door on what might be a solution for a workable building.
Miller: I mentioned that she was the first woman in Oregon to receive an architecture license by examination. What does that mean?
Jensen: There was one other woman who received a license. It was grandfathered in. So Ebba was the first female architect to take the examination, pass it and be licensed in that way.
Miller: Let’s turn to the library. Can you describe the original library that she designed?
Jensen: The original library that she and Ernest designed together, people like to consider Brutalist, because of its steel construction. It’s a single story, so it’s squat to the ground. It was clad with precast concrete panels that actually have quartz exposed in it. So it’s a unique exterior. It reads definitely as concrete, but there’s a lot more subtlety to it when you actually see it up close. And very, very narrow floor to ceiling, kind of gun-slit windows, so not a lot of ability to look into the original library
Miller: Or good if you’re being attacked by marauders?
Jensen: Sure, very, very much so. [Laughs] Or, I suppose, to help not expose artifacts and books to strong light.
Miller: [Laughs] I hadn’t thought of that piece.
Jensen: They designed it in 1965. And that was the version that ended up being created. But she had been proposing a design for that location, for a memorial library, since … I think her first one was in 1948. So she was already thinking about that site, that location, how to put all of the elements into it. And actually, the newly renovated library, which has exposed a lot more light by opening big glass windows, is actually in some small way more similar to her 1948 design, which did actually have large windows in it.
Miller: That’s fascinating. I want to get to the present day in just a second. But first, my understanding is that you grew up in Astoria. Do you have memories of going to Ebba’s original library?
Jensen: Absolutely. So I was born here in 1979, and I visited that library a lot in the 1980s. They had a great children’s section. I was always taken aback by the warmth of the interior versus the exterior. The exterior at the time, to me as a child, seemed monumental. But when you walked in, there were bright colors, there was lots of light wood, and it just seemed more intimate on the inside than it definitely appeared from the outside.
One thing that it also had was this mezzanine section. It was only a one-story library but it had a mezzanine section, where it was just great fun to go up there as like a teenager, and hide out and be moody. [Laughter] One of my favorite things about the old library too, up there in that mezzanine, was the rentable art. So there was a whole little section where you could go up there and look through all these paintings that you could rent out to take home and hang on your walls.
Miller: What have you learned about the community’s response to the library in the immediate years after it was built and then in the decades that followed? What did the library come to mean to historians?
Jensen: It was such a great spot. The location is great, it’s right downtown. And I know, as a young person going there for a lot of community meetings, there was a beautiful flag room that could be used when there were proposals for different things from the city or for art exhibitions. So it was a place where people really gathered. And people used it. It was utilitarian for sure.
But I don’t think anyone really understood that there was this push and pull of people who liked it versus disliked it, in terms of design, until they did start thinking … I think 2015, 2016, the city seriously undertook the discussion about whether or not we should build a new library. And all of a sudden people were like, wait, wait, wait, what is this library? What does it do? Why is it not meeting needs? Why was it built this way? Why does it look so different from our other architecture? And that just blossomed into this appreciation for Ebba.
Miller: When those debates were happening over the last decade, what were the two sides? My understanding is that there was one school of thought [to] just tear down this building that doesn’t serve us totally, that’s not big enough, that’s not a library of the 21st Century. And there was another side that said, wait, let’s renovate the library. Obviously, the renovating side won, but what was that debate like?
Jensen: The debate was very well meaning. It was wanting to figure out, what is a library? What are the needs of a library now? And honestly, I think the needs of a library have changed since that discussion 10 years ago. It really became a question of [whether] this library can meet the needs and still be something that we can be proud of. There were people who just thought it was ugly, to be honest. There’s people who didn’t like the Brutalist nature of it. They wanted to see something that would interact more with the street.
So renovating it, I think, initially, became the way to go because of limitations of funds. It’s definitely less expensive to renovate it than to start a whole new process in another location. But now that we’ve seen what they were able to do and open up all the space, because they were able to open up the basement area to essentially double the space of the library, even people who maybe had not thought it was possible are now converted.
Miller: Right, so that is the spoiler to the magical point that I made at the beginning in my intro. They were able to double the space by turning what had been, as I understand it, storage space that was not available to the public, in the basement, into a whole new open area with a new staircase, so that they’ve doubled the public space of the library without changing the exterior. Can you describe the feel of the new library?
Jensen: The feel of the new library is definitely a mixture. They’ve maintained some things about it that someone in the know, who had gone to the previous library, would be very happy to see. Things like the fluorescent light panels in the ceilings and the acoustical tiles are still there. The flag room is now being used as a staff space, but you can see there’s a window into that space. You can see that the woodline walls are still intact there.
But it’s just a much more open space. There’s much more light. I was really impressed with how they were able to get the light from these large, new windows into the basement space. The basement space does not feel enclosed or like you are in a basement at all, which was a real feat, considering that it had no windows to begin with.
Miller: In the bigger picture, why are you passionate about historical preservation?
Jensen: For me, growing up in a town well known for one specific type of architecture, when I think of that, I think of … People always, after I’ve been out of Astoria, I’d heard we’re like kind of a mini San Francisco. We have a lot of Victorians and things like that. So initially I thought yeah, that’s part of our history. We need to preserve it because it’s unique and because it’s something we’re known for. But as I’ve learned a lot more about the actual development of Astoria, and how it was planned, and how it’s developed over time, I’m actually much more fascinated with preserving the story of that development.
Ebba plays a huge role in that because she’s really in the heart of a period of urban renewal. She shows that Astoria is not in a bubble, that people who grew up in Astoria can leave this area, go learn things, take on skills from the world, and come back and bring them to their own communities. And I feel some affinity to that because that’s sort of my story.
Miller: So just briefly, maybe another way to ask that question. What do you think would have been lost if this building had been torn down? You have 45 seconds for that.
Jensen: If this building had been torn down, I think we’d be leaning more towards the possibility that Astoria could be redefined as being that frozen-in-time 1920s community. Instead it really highlights that we are of the times, throughout this whole 20th Century.
Miller: Rachel, thanks very much.
Jensen: Thank you.
Miller: Rachel Jensen is the executive director of the Lower Columbia Preservation Society. She joined us to talk about the renovated Astoria Library building, as well as the Astorian architect Ebba Wicks Brown, who designed it.
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