The project description for this studio assignment called for the design of a city library in a deteriorating part of a small city in the Americian Midewest. The set of givens for the project often seemed contradictory at first: the librarian stressed that the building should feel open and accessible, but safe and secure; the building was to face both the street to the north and the town square to the southwest.
The final design borrowed imagery of the previous city library (seen at the left edge of the left picture below) in order to draw upon local notions of how a public library should look and feel. Similar materials were used, and the octagonal dome and large gabled entries were deliberately reminiscent of the dome and classical porticoes of the earlier library.
The design also made use of building "layers": limestone-clad forms with lower ceilings and smaller windows pulling apart to reveal increasingly open, taller, more civic forms. In this way, stone walls could provide a sensation of security, while well-lit, transparent entryways could provide a sense of accessibility. The spiraling pattern of setbacks was intended to "scoop" people in from both the street and the town square toward the entrances of the building.
The layering of building forms included changes in ceiling height, fenestration size, and consequently, light levels. Inside the building, these changes were used to provide a spectrum of privacy from comfortable reading areas to monumental entries. This effect also addressed one of the librarian's other major concerns: that the building be easily navigable, inherently directing users to the exits and sources of information. The view below, looking from the octagonal entry area, down the skylit circulation spine to the card catalog area, shows the most public areas in the hierarchy of spaces.
The computer graphics seen here were created using the Movie.BYU surface modeler, photographed off the screen of a Silicon Graphics Iris. I created the site model seen in these images by digitizing plan drawings. A number of other students in the class found small plots of the site model to be useful as sketch underlays, particularly when working at home. The model of the library itself was more difficult to create, and often required the typing of large sets of Cartesian coordinates, followed by listing ID numbers of nodes to connect. Since the time when this model was created (1989), interfaces on modelers have improved considerably, allowing the creation of more extensive models.
