Library Buildings around the World

Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, New York – USA
http://www.pcfandp.com
Libraries:
Edmund D. Bossone Research Enterprise Center, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA – USA 2005
80.000 sqf. new construction, 70.000 sqf. renovation
The Edmund D. Bossone Research Enterprise Center is designed to create a powerful architectural statement reflecting Drexel
University's presence in the vanguard of technology research and education. The program combines 80,000 s/f of new construction
with 70,000 s/f of renovated space within the adjacent Commonwealth Hall, creating an integrated facility for multidisciplinary
research. The new facility serves to achieve synergy among researchers, the student body, and the surrounding scientific and
corporate communities. The new facility, situated at the gateway to the Drexel campus, was designed to coordinate with campus
master planning efforts to strengthen the reading of Drexel as an urban campus, combining strong street frontage with landscaped
mid-block gathering spaces for visitors, students, and staff. The main entry to the building off Market Street is provided by a sevenstory,
north-facing public atrium, reinforcing the definition of the street while beckoning visitors as a grand entrance to the new
facility. Major programmatic components at the ground level include a 280-seat lecture hall and reception area, student cafe,
exhibition lab, and electron microscope suite. Penetrating the atrium at the upper three levels from the south, the primary body of
the new lab program is oriented perpendicular to the diagonal axis of historic Lancaster Avenue and set back from the Peck Alumni
Center, which is located on the adjacent site to the west and originally designed as a bank by Frank Furness. The resulting exterior
space bordered by the public atrium, lab wing, and Peck Alumni Center provides an upper-level outdoor terrace overlooking the
main entry atrium to the north and a landscaped garden to the south. Internally, the new and renovated laboratories at the upper
levels provides flexible, state-of-the-art lab space organized around a three-story skylit private atrium, creating a common gathering
space for the building's users and focusing the horizontal and vertical circulation in a manner that facilitates a sense of community
within the building and informal interaction among faculty, students, and staff. Laboratory complex with "wet" and "dry" labs for
multidisciplinary research, as well as computer-based telemetry stations for data gathering and analysis; 7-story public atrium; 3story
private atrium; 280-seat lecture hall; student cafe; electron microscope suite; outdoor terrace. (Pei)
Center for Government and International Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA – USA 1998-2005
268.000 sqf.
The Center for Government and International Studies houses the Department of Government and various research centers affiliated
with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. The Center includes new and existing structures in an integrated
complex accommodating a range of academic and administrative uses, including faculty offices, classrooms, library and computer
facilities, the Harvard-MIT Data Center, and a café. The new complex unites members of the Government Department in a single
location alongside the thriving research centers. It promotes both formal and informal interactions among faculty from different
departments and disciplines and with visiting scholars from other universities in the United States and abroad. It provides space for
graduate students in close proximity to their faculty advisers and to students in related fields, thus deepening the mentoring
relationship so essential to graduate education and opening opportunities for first- and second-year graduate students to learn from
and interact with their more advanced colleagues. And, by including undergraduate instruction among the functions of the new
complex, it will provide Harvard College students with the opportunity to learn in a modern facility while increasing their
opportunities for everyday contact with faculty, tutors, and teaching fellows. Knafel Building: 5-story atrium, Library, Data Center,
interior Wintergarden, Café, faculty and graduate student offices, seminar rooms, interconnection to the Graduate School of Design
(Gund Hall), exterior Garden, South Building: 5-story atrium, 149-seat Lecture Hall, 60-seat Case Study room, seminar rooms,
faculty and graduate student offices, exterior sunken garden. (Pei)
San Francisco Main Public Library, CA – USA 1990-1996
Pei Cobb Freed with SMWM
Awards:
State-of-the-Art public library
Lead Designer: Lames Ingo Freed
Building Stone Institute: Annual Tucker Award 1998
AIA / ALA Library Building Award. Award of Excellence for Library Architecture 1997
18 th Annual Interiors Award: Best Library 1996
77.000 sqf.
This public library was designed to complete San Francisco's Civic Center, perhaps the finest example of the City Beautiful
movement in America. It echoes with a modernist attitude the materials and massing of neighboring Beaux-Arts institutions,
fronting on the Civic Center with two symmetrical façades. The library's two other facades make a contemporary response to the
adjacent commercial district. The design is organized to permit passage into and through the building and out to the opposite side of
the full-block site. The Library is thus both a destination and a link connecting the modern city with its cultural core, a bridge
between the people of San Francisco and the institutions that serve and enrich them. Internal organization centers around a
monumental open staircase and a five-story atrium, 60 feet in diameter, that provides a luminous hub of orientation. A glassenclosed
Periodicals Reading Room, suspended above, further helps to draw light into the core of the 300' x 200' building. Bridges
link the different precincts and reinforce the metaphor of connection in a library that provides access to both advanced online
information systems and more than three million books on open/closed stacks. The New Main attempts to integrate the different
people, interests, and precincts of the city, both traditionally and electronically, physically and symbolically, now and well into the
future. 32 miles open / closed books stacks; 300 terminals, 500 on-line ports; 80' high public atrium (3,700 s/f circular component
only); Monumental Stair; 5,700 s/f Periodicals Reading Room; Special Collections (8 rooms @ 1,100 s/f each), 3,550 s/f auditorium
(620 seats), public meeting rooms, exhibition spaces, roof garden, café, bookstore, commissioned art (Alice Aycock Stair, Nayland
Blake Installation, Ann Hamilton and Ann Chamberlain Installation, Charley Brown and Mark Evans ceiling mural)
Assicate Architect: Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris, San Francisco, CA (Pei)
John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA (University of California), Library, Los
Angeles, CA – USA 1987 - 1995
Awards:
AIA:New York State Design Awards: Honor Award 1998
AIA-Brick Institute of America: Brick in Architecture Award 1997
270.000 sqf.
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