Library Buildings around the World

Moreover, the art park and the Library are the front yard and the living room for the City — places where residents and visitors can
gather to give and share the special pleasure of the place and its culture. (Stern)
Clearwater Public Library, Clearwater, FL – USA 2004
The Clearwater Public Library had a special responsibility to become a locally recognizable landmark, a source of civic pride, and a
community-wide learning resource. It also represents an anchor in the redevelopment of downtown Clearwater. The design takes
full advantage of the unique site, on a bluff overlooking Coachman Park and Clearwater Harbor, to create a building that looks
optimistically to the future while respecting the building traditions of Clearwater and the region. The principal street facade, along
North Osceola Avenue, presents an urbane and dignified civic building, using traditional local materials like cream-colored local
stone and stucco, bracketed projecting roofs, and a civic-scaled, deeply shaded entry porch. The garden facade, which opens onto
Coachman Park and the waterfront, has large windows to capitalize on the magnificent views, and a broad canopy to screen out
excessive sunlight. A terrace with a trellis and plantings is at the top of the building for civic social events. The gently undulating roof
creates a memorable profile for the building appropriate to its location near the Gulf of Mexico. The interior of the 90,000-squarefoot
building provides for greatly expanded and enhanced services: a children’s library nearly four times the size of the one in the
existing building; state-of-the-art audiovisual and conference room facilities; greatly expanded internet and other computer services,
to augment the enhanced collections of paper materials; and a specially-designed Clearwater Room, which will showcase a city-wide
resource for local history and genealogy. The new building offers a much more efficient and user-friendly layout, replacing the
confusion of the previous library, which was made up of four separate buildings and additions that have been cobbled together over
a period of 90 years. Great care was taken to use durable materials to create a library that is efficient to maintain and to operate.
Controlled natural daylighting supplements and reduces artificial lighting requirements, and rainwater is captured and reused for
irrigation, reducing overall water use. Building materials were selected for their appropriateness to local conditions and
sustainability, as well as their beauty and utility (Stern)
Morningside Heights Branch, New York Public Library, New York, NY - USA 2001
Located at the northeast corner of 113th Street and Broadway, on the edge of Columbia's historic McKim, Mead & White campus,
the 14-story, 371-bed undergraduate Broadway Residence Hall largely faces away from the campus to engage the Morningside
Heights neighborhood to the south and west. The building is clad in cast-stone-trimmed tawny-colored brick selected after extensive
discussions with both the University and members of the surrounding community, which preferred a design in the spirit of the
residential apartment buildings which line Broadway to one that matched the red brick and limestone of the Columbia campus.
The two lower floors of the building are largely devoted to retail and to the 17,000 square foot Morningside Heights branch of the
New York Public Library. The interior of the library was inspired by the restrained Classicism of early 20th century Carnegie
branches, with paneled columns and ceiling beams, decorative metal railings, built-in wood bookshelves, and a slate floor in the
entrance lobby. RAMSA Partner Alexander Lamis served as Project Partner. (Stern)
Manzanita Hall, College of Arts, Media, and Communication, California State University, Northridge, CA
– USA 2001
Manzanita Hall on the California State University campus at Northridge houses the College of Arts, Media and Communication,
including departmental and faculty offices, classrooms, television studios, and editing suites for three departments: Journalism;
Communication Studies; and Radio, Television, and Film. It also contains two galleries, a 120-seat screening room, and a 120-seat
lecture hall. Part of a larger effort to rebuild the California State University campus after the 1997 Northridge earthquake, the AMC
Building addresses the structural and technical demands of a state of the art teaching facility and complements the modern
traditions of the 43-year-old Northridge campus with a 98,000 square foot building that defines the southwest corner of Sierra Quad.
Facing the quad, the building's galleries look to the north through a two storey high glass and metal curtain wall raised on a single
story buff colored brick base and capped with an upward curving metal roof carried by a double-height colonnade of tripartite
metal column bundles, echoing the design and the scale of the Oviatt Library, toward which it opens across Sierra Quad. At the
northeast corner of the building, the last bay of the colonnade is open to shelter a triple-height roofed entrance plaza, bounded to the
south by a smooth-finished concrete wall which encloses the screening room. Inside the north wing, in addition to the galleries,
screening room, and lecture hall, there are nine multimedia classrooms and offices for the student newspaper, The Sundial. On the
second floor, behind the double-height gallery and lounge overlooking views of Oviatt and Sierra Quad, are seminar rooms and
specialized spaces for the Journalism and Communication Studies departments. Faculty offices and computer labs are located on the
third floor. Stretching to the west and south behind the glass and brick facade, the majority of the building is a stucco-clad L-shaped
mass, the wings of which form two sides of a landscaped green. The south wing houses the Radio, Television and Film department
offices, television and film studios, editing suites, and computer labs. The main hallway of the south wing runs along its east edge,
with views to the green. Bounded to the north and west by the AMC building, the outer edges of courtyard green are marked by
allees of eucalyptus trees, creating a grassy plaza that will serve as a focal point for the School of Arts, Media, and Communication.
(Stern)
Nashville Public Library, Nashville, TN – USA 2001
83.000.000 $
ENashville is "Music City USA"; it is also, and has been for much longer, the "Athens of the South," with a strong, distinct classical
tradition that permeates its architecture, from William Strickland's Tennessee State Capitol to modest houses. Our library design,
which won a national design competition, recognizes that tradition, not only in its exterior massing and formal language, but in the
clear, axial organization of its most symbolically significant public areas – the Main Entry Lobby; the Nashville Room, housing the
local history collection; the Gallery; the Grand Reading Room; the skylit Grand Stair; and the Courtyard – all of which are located
on the axis of the Capitol, helping to strengthen the dangerously frayed fabric of the civic center complex as a whole. The library is
fitted into a steeply sloping site, with portions of the upper two floors built atop an existing parking structure. The building is
complex but designed to make way-finding intuitive. The main spaces are uniquely suited for social interaction, from the grand
figural spaces of reading and circulation to the quiet eddies of informal seating that are distributed throughout the open stack areas,
especially around the courtyard. Our building is both functional and grand; it is definitely not a shopping mall for books. The three
story height along Church Street was derived from a practical desire to retain the existing parking structure and take advantage of
its structural capacity to locate above it two large floors that look outwards to the surrounding townscape and inwards to a
landscaped courtyard, which, with its central fountain, pool, and covered arcade, will provide an oasis and a setting for special
readings and events. As the Library is the flagship of a public library system which serves the diverse Nashville population, the
project involved an extraordinary amount of community input. The most visible benefit of this involvement is the Public Art
Program, which brought in local graphic artists, authors, photographers, painters, sculptors, and metalworkers to enrich the
building with artwork. The building also incorporates the work of nationally known artists including Richard Haas and Kent
Bloomer. (Stern)
Bangor Public Library, Bangor, ME – USA 1998
This project includes a 27,000 square foot addition to and 40,000 square foot renovation of the 500,000 volume Bangor Public
Library, a brick and stone neoclassical building by the architectural firm of Peabody and Stearns and completed in 1913. The
building is set in a downtown public park adjacent to City Hall and the main shopping district. The addition nearly doubles the
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