Austin is reinventing the public library, and Dallas should too from buzai232's blog
SignTheLine
Austin is reinventing the public library, and Dallas should too Five years ago, at a time when the library was under assault as an obsolete institution in the digital age, writer and critic Zadie Smith argued to the contrary in a widely quoted essay. "What a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." In short order that bit of wisdom has been received, such that providing storage and access to books is now just one element of the library program, and arguably not the principal one. The new Central Library in Austin is a case in point. There are books, to be sure, but it was built to be much more than a place to read them. It is, as well, a co-working place, a conference center, an educational facility, a technology hub, a business incubator, a gallery, a bookstore, a live-music venue and performance space, a café, a butterfly garden, a bicycle repair clinic, and just about anything else Austinites might imagine for it.library reading room furnitureThe task of defining just what a library in Austin could and should be was fleshed out not in the city itself but some three hours to the west, in Rock Springs. It was there that the architects collaborating on the project, from San Antonio's Lake Flato and Boston's Shepley Bulfinch, held a "rancharette" that established the parameters for their design. "We really wanted to create a new living room for Austin that was part of people's daily routines," says Jonathan Smith, who directed work for Lake Flato. "This is not your traditional warehouse for books." They also wanted to take advantage of the prime downtown site on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, looking over the Colorado River and Shoal Creek. It is an area reclaimed from heavy industrial use — an electric plant still sits behind the library — and now being developed, or rather overdeveloped, with a series of placeless glass condo towers. In this context, it is left to the library to keep Austin weird, an effort that it makes in a rather clunky fashion. If your idea of a great public library equates to beaux-arts classicism, with grand entries and clearly articulated reading rooms, Austin's new library will be practically unrecognizable. It is, instead, a hulking machine with a grim bearing, composed of a base of beige stone from Lueders and a superstructure of gray panels of aluminum and perforated screens of anodized metal. It has entries on three sides, and a garage on the fourth, and above them all there are projections and set backs and walls set at cocky angles. To read how it functions from the outside is all but impossible. Legibility issues aside, it is a good neighbor, with a native landscape that leads down to biking and pedestrian paths along Shoal Creek and the Colorado River. The principal entrance is on the rapidly developing commercial hub that is Second Street rather than the high-speed corridor that is Cesar Chavez.
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