Two New Public Libraries That Tell Very Different Stories

The new Far Rockaway branch of SNøhetta from the Queens public library.
Photo: Jeff Goldberg / This

Three curious things will hit you on the building at the intersection of Central Avenue and Mott Avenue in Far Rockaway: it is an orange glass box, it is covered with a rough white whirlpool pattern, and it separates at the corner like a split skirt. It is not clear at the beginning what the building could be used for, but you cannot confuse it with a house, a clinic, a funeral lounge or a car dealer, and therefore when you have gravity to the triangular portal, you are not surprised to discover that it is the distant branch of Rockaway from the public library of Queens.

The two -story structure combines luxury and fanciful qualities, both rare in this part of the city. His oddity is part of what is belonging to the building. Even on a gray day, it shines. Craig Dykers, who managed the SNøhetta design team, the architectural firm he co -founded, says that the color drifts of sunsets on the ocean with a few pies of houses. A set of indecipherable notes on the glass, by the artist of Brooklyn, José Parlá, turns out to be a pseudo-writing, fortunately abstract and without content, a representation of the representation. At the nearest bus stop, the passengers wait in front of this facade, and the scribbles seem to spring from their minds as a cartoon speech that has freed itself from its bubbles. Until now, the walls remain non -final and not marked. “People protect what they like,” says Dykers.

The tinted glass walls give light an amber glow.
Photo: Jeff Goldberg / This

It takes a slow and deliberate process to cultivate this protective love. A library is not only a benchmark for printing volumes or a versatile installation that helps users improve their English, produce income statements or seek jobs. It is also a neighborhood tag, a place where children at the ends can stop even if he does not serve alcohol or fries. The Far Rockaway branch attracts them to a triangles honeycomb nest, with concrete columns in the shape of a V and a staircase that cuts diagonally across the center, under an isosceles light well. The folded metal pyramids are suspended from this glass ceiling segment, diffusing dazzling. It’s like a geometry lesson without an appointment.

Light also takes various forms, crossing the translucent walls to launch an amber glow or activate the dichroic glass balustrades that change color when you pass. There are no dark places or cut here; From deep inside the second floor, you can look in the street, to the ground level or for an overview of the clouds. The architects have designed the opportunities to hide. (Sunshine can be too good; after opening the building, a member of the Bibliothèque buttoned staff by dikes to complain about persistent dazzling on his computer screen. He promised to find a solution.)

Snøhetta designed the building to accommodate everyone, and this can create friction. The bar to keep (or expel) someone is high, but during my visit, a man using a computer terminal suddenly started to shout and cursed, and he maintained noisy threats while the security guards escorted him on the street. The librarians also adjust the collection to correspond to the flow in the demography of Far Rockaway. Black and Latin American visitors predominate, but on Friday afternoon, a cohort of Orthodox Jewish children is racing before the Sabbath, emptying image books like Yitzi and the giant menrah And A synagogue just like the house.

In Far Rockaway, metal origami on the ceiling is intended to diffuse sound; Dichroic glass balustrades change color when you pass.
Photo: Jeff Goldberg / This

Like most public projects, it has advanced at a disjointed pace, and the architects used delays to study the institution, the neighbors and the interaction between them to ask all those they met what they hoped that the building would do for them. Community commitment has become a watchword among the planners and architects of the cities, a prelude necessary for the construction of public projects. To hear the Dykers talking about it, one might think that he did not descend the library as much as drawing a composite sketch of the desires of others. What invites a question: how should a library be adapted to the district it serves? The pace of construction is often late on the rhythm from which the groups enter and go out, the elders die and the children grow. You can get involved with the community you have, but not with the one that is about 15 years later, when the ribbon is finally cut. In Far Rockaway, the result speaks well for the approach of Snøhetta: consult everything you like, then leave and offer a design that no one would have thought of asking, the one who will pretend anyone as a natural, even exhilarating place.

The new design of the branch of new unlike new lots of the Brooklyn public library offers a more targeted approach. An architectural team uniting Mass Design Group and Marble Fairbanks found inspiration in the sociologist’s book Eric Klinenberg, 2018, Palace for the people, A study on how public buildings promote what he calls social infrastructure. In See this book For the New York TimesA mayor of the Midwest named Pete Buttigieg has thought about how Klinenberg’s theories could be applied to concrete decisions about how to spend (and not to spend) taxpayers: “Social infrastructure becomes less to maximize than on an objective that communities and decision -makers must apply to each routine decision: Connections? “”

A rendering of the next library of new lots in Brooklyn.
Photo: Mass Design Group & Marble Fairbanks Architects

To help answer this question in New Lots, the Brooklyn public library hired the non -profit agency Hester Street, which was founded in 2003 “to ensure that the neighborhoods are shaped by the people who live there”. This seems to be an obviously virtuous goal, but it is also a political objective. A government agency (the BPL) promotes the change of one hand and one stasis with the other. The architecture he embraces is fresh, turned forward, elegant and sensitive, but it is also designed to express an explicitly based story on the breed for the present population of New Lots. (Hester Street closed last summer, shortly before the White House began to treat its reason for a bad fate: the organization, its promotion note said: “Worked to advance racial equity and economic justice through projects focused on open space, community property, civic engagement, environmental justice and climate resilience, justice, justice, culture, and a puff.

The districts change. The priorities are changing, long -standing residents are leaving, the economic patterns are disturbed and institutions move on, leaving their balls behind. White farmers who set up new lots in the 1820s left some traces with the exception of the graceful church of new lots, which cost them a lot of free workforce and a total of $ 35. It is still on the avenue New lots of the library, a city ​​monument And the house of a small congregation of the African methodist episcopal church in Zion. The district is now mainly black, and it therefore resonated when, in 2013, Determined archaeologists that the earth under the short of the library had been the original cemetery of the church and contained the remains of many blacks of the 19th century. Hester Street Consultants asked residents new lots to help translate this ancestral story into three -dimensional shape. To start, the playground has been renamed Sankofa Park (from a Ghanaian concept to go ahead while honoring the past) and redesigned.

An external rendering of the BPL branch in New Lots.
Photo: Mass Design Group & Marble Fairbanks Architects

The commemorative impulse also permeates the plan of a new library adjacent to the playground. Motivated by the answers of the neighbors, the architects produced an organization chart of the lifting imperatives: Invite, empower, reflect, recognize, celebrate, release. They then mapped these stages of a transformational journey imagined on specific design elements. The central characteristic is a mass cannon column that branches into the ceiling ribs, an interior urban shape of the Palaver tree where villagers in West Africa come together to resolve conflicts. A trophy staircase leads to an open room with double height with a wall that will sport a story on the cemetery. The building next to the glass will be wrapped in an envelope pixelated in metal slats – similar in the concept in the veil surrounding the National Museum of African -American History and Culture in Washington, DC – some of which are registered with epigrams by black leaders. The roof terrace offers a view of the commemorative park.

What all these details are added is a building and a landscape designed together and joined a goal to give the Library users a way to absorb history in their current life. Design offers exhortation: Remember, but move on; Continue, but keep remember. It is a message that suits architecture, which is constantly negotiating between the city it finds and that which it shapes, between the interpreted past and the desired future.