Mass Urban

The New York Times:

“Libraries See Opening as Bookstores Close

By Karen Ann Cullota. Dec 27, 2012

At the bustling public library in Arlington Heights, Ill., requests by three patrons to place any title on hold prompt a savvy computer tracking system to order an additional copy of the coveted item. That policy was intended to eliminate the frustration of long waits to check out best sellers and other popular books. But it has had some unintended consequences, too: the library’s shelves are now stocked with 36 copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Photo: Tyler Bissmeyer for The New York Times

Architect’s Newspaper:

Nov 6, 2012.

“CRIT> ADJAYE’S D.C. LIBRARIES

Gwen Webber.

Two new libraries by David Adjaye push accessibility, transparency, and sense of ownership to the forefront.

Washington, D.C was once a swamp. Today it stands as an architectural and urban exemplar of austerity and sobering restraint. The outlying residential areas have also been pulled out of the marshes and, over time, developed into sprawl, some of which play host to the demons of modern urban American society: inferior amenities, poor education, and social inequality. Though it doesn’t pretend to solve these problems, DC Public Library (DCPL) has begun to chip away at some of these ills with a program to improve a vital piece of community infrastructure.

Aware that it wasn’t enough to simply build or restore the most dilapidated of the district’s 24 libraries, many of which have not been refurbished since the 1960s, DCPL Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper and the library’s board enlisted designers whom they felt would challenge the status quo. Their libraries had to offer something that a wireless connection and a PC couldn’t. Along with Davis Brody Bond Aedas, Freelon Group, and Bing Thom, Cooper commissioned David Adjaye, the Ghanaian-British architect who flipped the notion of a traditional library on its head with his East London Idea Stores in 2005.

Unlike the other architects, who were paired with contractors and set to work on a single site, Adjaye and local firm Wiencek and Associates, was commissioned to design two distinct libraries, both in Ward 8, with the same brief, budget, and timeline. The result, from the outside, puts to rest any questions that high-profile architects are as good as their signature styles. Indeed, vocal neighbors have been quick to compare the two libraries as if penned by a different hand. Yet, these polarized forms belie their interiors where Adjaye’s characteristic affection for design is played out.

In the Frances A. Gregory Library on Alabama Avenue in the Fort Davis neighborhood in the S.E. district, material exuberance begins on the outside. Sliced into a lattice of different sized diamonds, the two-story pavilion’s external spandrel and low-E glazing form a skin that simultaneously draws the environment in and reflects it back, like a circus mirror. Designed to “dissolve,” as Adjaye puts it, the 22,000-square-foot building sits anchored like an island between the local school and a playground, but its closest neighbor is the stretch of protected woodland behind it. To say it revives DC’s historic swamp would be going too far, but from the rear verandah on the first floor and the purpose-built plywood nooks in the children’s section on the second floor a less manicured environment than the surrounding neighborhood is easy to imagine.

It is this subversion of context and play on the suburban site that Adjaye deftly taps into with his D.C. libraries. The squat, shoebox form speaks to an earlier civic architecture that was rolled out in the 1950s and, despite its conspicuous shell and heavy steel cantilevered canopy, the building somehow resonates with the residential milieu. Inside the circus theme is explored further with a frenzy of colors, materials, and reflected geometries that is more akin to an urban pavilion. Underlying this energy though, the library’s civic duty is clearly defined and the materials have been carefully choreographed. As with all of Adjaye’s public buildings, there is a clear and coherent code. Legibility is king.”

Photos: Edmund Sumner

“Discarded by Walmart, a Box Store Becomes a Thriving Library

Zak Stone. July 3, 2012

While corporations have enjoyed record profits during the economic downturn, municipalities have struggled to keep basic services like school systems running. With big cities from Detroit to Denver making significant cuts in service, libraries have been particularly beleaguered. But those trends are what make the recent opening of the New Main Library in McAllen, Texas so remarkable, and not just because it’s well designed. Since December, residents of this South Texas border town eager to use free internet, check out a novel, or even relax over a cup of coffee can do so in an unusual location: a former Walmart, renovated to become the country’s largest single-story library.

According to local news reports, the city purchased the abandoned store from the corporation for $5 million and spent nearly $26 million dollars total on the project, with renovations led by the Minneapolis-based firm MS&R Architecture. While a 2 1/2 football-field sized property has great potential (think of all the books!), the massiveness posed the “primary challenge” to the design team which relied heavily on color to help users understand the floor-plan and navigate the building. Features include conference rooms, a coffee shop, a copy center, an acoustically-shielded space for chatty teenagers, and a 64-terminal computer lab: not bad for a small city with a population less than 150,000 people.

The library replaced McAllen’s 61-year-old institution, which city officials say they outgrew. And while there’s always nostalgia for losing an old relic, the public appears to be loving their new home for learning. Reports from local news showed that more than 10 times as many people registered for new accounts in December 2011 when the library opened than the same month in 2010. On opening day, 2,000 people queued to be the first inside.

Examining the before and after pictures is, perhaps, most remarkable. The space transforms from a drop-ceiling, painfully lit, box store warehouse to a warm, inviting and dynamic space for learning, thinking, and socializing. It’s a refreshing example of how cities can do something about vacant megastores, byproducts of vaciliation in corpoarte decision-making about which stores to keep open. The new design isn’t going unnoticed: the library just took home the 2012 top award for library interior design by the American Library Association and the International Interior Design Association.”

Via: GOOD Magazine

Photo: MS&R Architecture