The first thing you notice about the renovation of the Oakland Carnegie Library's first floor is that it's very, very white. Shockingly, jaw-droppingly, antiseptically white.

Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette Messages are shown by computer as part of the new additions in the Oakland Carnegie Library. Click photo for larger image. Main Library closed today Due to preparations for re-opening the renovated first floor tomorrow, the Main Library at 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland, and its Telephone Ready Reference Service Unit will be closed today. Regular hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday.

The second thing you notice is that the venerable interior's bleached bones -- its Ionic columns and graceful arches -- command attention in a way they never did before. Woven among them are new glass walls and information panels, with dynamic electronic graphics that promote library collections, events and services.

The architect, Friendship-based EDGE studio, has managed this intersection of the old and familiar and the new and innovative with a deft hand. What could have been a gaudy, high-tech assault on the historic interior is a stimulating, balanced blend that gives each its due. And while six interior arches were opened to create an airy, expansive, flowing space, all of the new glass walls, with varying levels of transparency, wrap around existing ones, leaving most of the original interior untouched.

The overarching goal of the $4.1 million renovation, which opens to the public tomorrow, is to make the library more comfortable and easier to navigate. Media-savvy young people will love it, but the degree of comfort longtime library users feel may depend on their willingness to embrace change. Not only are things not where they used to be, but there are new spaces, like a cafe where the quiet Gillespie reading room was, and an indoor/outdoor reading room, with a curvy Airstream aesthetic, set in a bamboo garden.

There's a new elevator, too, leading to the cafe and accommodating those who park in the Carnegie Institute garage. To find it, visitors entering from the rear will walk past the security desk and into the courtyard that eventually will accommodate the $35 million Dinosaur Hall expansion, scheduled for completion in 2007. Or they can take the new rear staircase, with translucent glass treads inspired by the glass floors of the library's stacks, which the staircase penetrates.

Visitors entering through the front door will be pleased to see that both sides of the grand staircase to the second floor, with its time-worn marble treads, are once again open for business. Straight ahead, four newly opened arches provide more options for entering the main room, which houses what might be called the popular library -- fiction and new nonfiction, science fiction, cookbooks, travel, mystery, graphic novels, books, DVDs, videos and magazines.

To the right is the cafe, serving beverages, pastries and sandwiches. The adjacent Library Shop sells souvenirs as well as used books (but far fewer than Andrew's Alcove did).

Some patrons may sniff at the new surroundings, take one look at the cafe's bright yellow Marmoleum floor and flee upstairs, where an Old World atmosphere still reigns in the handsome restoration of a decade ago. Others will order a latte and happily settle in at one of the cafe's tables, or carry it over to the bamboo reading room.

Officially known as the Indoor and Outdoor Reading Deck, the room, surrounded by non-invasive bamboo that will grow to 25 feet, is one of the renovation's best features, created from previously unused exterior space within the building. The floor of the outdoor room is made of rich, dark ipe (pronounced ee-pay) wood, a sustainable Brazilian product that sinuously wraps around to become the floor, back wall and ceiling of the adjacent periodical room.

The thick, wavy-glass floor tiles removed from the stacks during the staircase installation have been recycled into a sort of bridge separating the indoor and outdoor reading decks -- and linking the main room with the new film and audio room.

The furniture and lighting fixtures are contemporary and eclectic: faux-leather stuffed chairs in a side reading room; aluminum pedestal tables and mesh chairs in the bamboo room; orange molded plastic seats in the teen area; and custom brushed steel and acrylic librarian's desks and computer stations throughout.

For all its modernity, there is a refreshing lack of arrogance to this renovation, built by Burchick Construction Co. of Pittsburgh. Unlike the 1970s makeover of the Allegheny branch library, which destroyed most of its historic interior, all of the changes here, while meant to look substantial rather than ephemeral, are reversible.

Its planners know that somewhere down the road, today's high-tech wizardry is going to look very 2004.