Plans have now been announced for the building of a modern research and academic library on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University.
The facility will honor the late John McCain, who served in Congress for 35 years, representing Arizona, and was the 2008 Republican nominee for president.
The facility, to be called the John S. McCain III Library, will be built on a 22.5-acre site to the direct north of the main campus.
According to plans, the building will include an archive housing McCain’s papers relating to his long public career, as well as a visitors’ center. The structure will also be the Arizona home to the McCain Institute, which is headquartered in Washington and tasked with studying leadership and public policy issues.
By design, the new 80,000 square-foot library will be located so as to provide an elevated view not just of the campus itself, but also the Rio Salado riverbed and Tempe Town Lake.
The new library project will actually see the construction of several buildings surrounding a landscaped site that has been owned by the university, but underused, since the 1980s.
The site itself is regarded as historic Native American land, a fact alluded to by Jacob Moore, special advisor to ASU President Michael Crow. In a statement, Moore said the university intends to work with area Native American communities to “ensure that the planning and design process incorporates their interests and sensitivities and honors those lands as Native American lands.”
While a timetable for both the development and eventual construction of the McCain library has not yet been released, the ASU Foundation, which focuses on donor support for the university, has announced that it will soon launch a fundraising campaign for the project.
By Garry Boulard
