PROJECT REPORT: CULTURAL, CIVIC & FAITH BUILDINGS
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© John Bartelstone
© John Bartelstone
by 1.6 metres, to enable open air visual connection with the building’s historic counterpart from a new terrace.
Design approach
The SNFL is the largest lending library in the New York Public Library network, with 1.3 million visitors annually. Being designed as a store, which remained its function until the 1970s, it has a more prosaic, although elegant look. As well as a large lending library, it also accommodates English teaching and other workshops and classes. As well as taking detail cues from the much-loved research library across the road, the architects also “tried to listen to the logic of its programme,” says Houben, when it came to the redesign of the lending branch. They would need to achieve the aspirations without extending beyond, or altering, the historic envelope. That being said, fortunately the six-storey building was not a ‘designated individual landmark,’ which, says Leber, “gave us more latitude.” She adds that despite this, it has “great bones, good visibility, and a stately presence.” Despite being well used, says Houben, the six-storey structure’s internal design meant it was “not a healthy building, with dark spaces, high shelving and poor ventilation.” A small pocket park sits to the north, however windows facing it had been filled in, so one key move was to open up views of
ADF DECEMBER 2021 this precious green space.
The chief design challenges were an “enormous amount of columns,” alongside the fact the building would have to rehouse its 400,000 books, while opening up the dark floorplate and accommodating the children’s library. However, if the architects didn’t use high shelving, which creates its own challenges, “all the floors would be full of bookshelves,” says Houben. Slightly emulating the ‘hanging book wall’ Mecanoo devised at Delft University of Technology, the architects designed a hybrid floor plan combination – removing and replacing a large part of the building’s rear flank internally, to provide a “Long Room” over five levels, containing tall bookshelves. Houben was also inspired by the Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin, where bookshelves are perpendicular to the axis. The key idea for this 60 metre long
space, was to still make it “browsable by hand,” despite housing a high volume of books, thereby freeing up the rest of the floorplates to have a variety of collections in low-level shelving.
A three-storey atrium was created above the ground floor, with tall windows opened in its red-painted south wall, providing views over the previously unseen pocket park. The atrium separates the retained existing three floors of lending library space from a new compact structure of five slim
© John Bartelstone
“A lot of architects think that libraries are about books, but they are about collections” Francine Houben, Mecanoo
PUBLIC SPACE
The building was opened up to the rear, adding an atrium and new steel floors – housing tall bookshelves arranged perpendicular to the axis
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