City planners have unveiled Boston’s first glimpse of plans for the South End public library branch after years of closure following a flood.

Officials held their third public meeting for the project on June 12, this time with blueprints detailed enough for size estimates and building massing. The library hopes to erect a 2-story branch with a partial third floor.

Planners were quick to emphasize that these are just preliminary drafts and the interior of the space could change drastically depending on resident feedback, though they still caught some flak from stakeholders displeased they’d already settled on a rough massing for the branch.

“The floor plans that we show you will get more detailed as we lay out specific locations for seating and shelving. What you’re seeing tonight is the beginning of this process, not the end, and there will be lots of opportunities to interact with this design as it becomes more specific,” said Utile architect Brett Benson.

“We’ve been asking to discuss a third floor since the first proposals in February. And we wanted to get to that before the point we’ve arrived at tonight, when you’ve decided on a particular test fit, foreclosing that discussion and moving on to design. It’s a little disappointing to say you’ll listen to what the community wants and then to come to this meeting and to be told, ‘well, we’ve kind of already decided on what we want to do,’” said Steve Fox, head of the South End Forum.

The current draft would increase the size of the branch by around 40%, the largest construction among recent library branch projects.

Much of those gains come from expanded areas for children and teens. Current blueprints have the children’s area on the first floor and the teen’s on the second, though designers again stressed that this is just an initial proposal, and the final layout will be decided after community input.

There will also be more backend space for librarians and a variety of community rooms, ranging in size from a phone nook to two six-person study rooms and several ten-person spaces, culminating in a 100-seat community meeting room.

“We heard over and over again in our feasibility study that having these different sizes of space was important to the community, so we’re incorporating that into this conceptual program,” said Benson.

City estimates suggest the South End branch serves a population of roughly 47,000 residents.

Overall community response was generally encouraging, though residents expressed a wide variety of comments from the fairly optimistic to some that criticized spending the money on a library at all.

The most controversial element was the plan for cooking equipment, a result of outreach responses that wanted dedicated food programming in the branch. Public comments during June’s meeting saw several people question the necessity of including that in library plans.

There will be further community meetings about the design coming in late summer, probably in September, though no date has yet been set for them. Finalizing floor plans alongside interior and exterior design will happen afterward, sometime this year.

Actual construction is estimated to start mid to late 2025 and take around 2 years.