Situated near a lake in the desert above the Mojave River, the new Learning Resource Center at Victor Valley Community College provides more reading and study areas, book stacks, conference rooms and offices to the college’s existing library. The building’s form (including its central skylight, roof monitors, and angled shading devices) provides dramatic natural lighting in the addition’s reading areas.

Several years ago the college engineering staff discovered it was able to obtain some cooling power by using chilled water from an on-site well. The new building now uses this same method to cool more than 75,000 square feet of space. Water with a yearly average temperature of 50Í F is extracted from wells 200 feet underground and circulated through heat exchangers that normally would be connected to cooling towers. This chilled well water then is proportioned through a three-way valve to cool the building.

The college has completely eliminated the need for cooling towers since the slightly warmed water is discharged into the nearby campus lake. From there, it is gravity-fed to a twin booster-pump facility that distributes it by irrigating athletic fields on campus. In this way, most of the water is returned to its underground source.