Description
Situated on the opposite bank of the Tagus River from greater metropolitan Lisbon, Almada houses a significant part of the service workforce of the capital city. In the 1960s, it was the refuge of citizens from both the nearby countryside and from the former Portuguese colonies of Cape Verde, Angola and Mozambique in search of work in the capital. Since the 1990s, development in Almada has resulted in improved infrastructure for transportation, water and sanitation.
Completed in 2012, the Biblioteca Municipal de Almada was part of a vision for renewal in this dense and underserved neighborhood. Located within the Parque do Fróis and near the high school, the simple and elegant library serves a low-income population of which 30 % is under the age of 20. Sited on a barren hill amid conventional housing blocks, the concrete and glass library takes the form of a quasi pinwheel. The concrete of the building, formed with vertical striations, is a playful ribbon that floats above a horizontal continuum of glass, a welcome contrast to the perfunctory openings in the surrounding housing flats.
A square in concept, the library plan is eroded by a series of outdoor rooms set upon a low base planted with trees. These deep and narrow courtyards inhabit the negative space of the pinwheel and separate the programmatic functions of the adult section, the children’s room, a multi-purpose community space and the administrative wing. On the exterior they serve as outdoor meeting spaces for this community but within the interior, they provide a sheltered view for the various reading rooms. Through a sectional relationship between the low green plinth on the exterior and the seemingly sunken interior floor plane, the readers, both old and young, are offered a view into a verdant oasis in this gritty urban neighborhood. The relationship between the exterior and the interior is both subtle and gentle in its proffer of a protected place from which community building can begin to take place.
The design of the Biblioteca Municipal de Almada aims to foster autonomy and social diversification through reading, culture and learning. The work of Santa Rita Arquitectos is exemplary of a new type of library as a place for community engagement.
Drawings
Ground floor
Roof view
Section BB
South elevation
Design sketches
Photos
The library against the backdrop of Almada’s housing blocks
Raised outdoor rooms provide sheltered green views through the continuous ribbon of glass
Originally published in: Nolan Lushington, Wolfgang Rudorf, Liliane Wong, Libraries: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2016.