Description

Designed by architect Will Bruder, the Burton Barr Central Library, serving the community of Phoenix, captures a decisive period of change in library design in America.

The 26,000 m² Burton Barr Central Library opened in 1995, at the eve of the technological era. Inspired by Arizona’s famed Monument Valley, the library takes its shape from the mesa, a flat-topped elevated landform of the Southwest. Clad in copper and enclosing a five-story atrium in its center, this volume is covered by a suspended tension structure. Housing some 705,000 items, this massive metal and glass structure, a landmark on the city’s skyline, serves as the symbolic and administrative center for Phoenix’s Public Library system. It also holds the largest reading room in North America, a vast 4,000 m² space situated in open plan on the top floor.

Designed at a time not yet submerged in the culture of sustainability, the building is notable for its environmentally focused features, both passive and mechanical, that include a computerized louver system on its south-facing facade, horizontal louvers, modular lighting systems, fixed light-deflecting sails and skylights that track the movement of the sun so as to provide consistent natural lighting. Its architectural orientation and features are designed to display sunlight alignment on equinox days with a “light show”. Predating the LEED program by several years, the library received LEED Existing Building Silver designation in 2010. More recently, with funds from an Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grant, the library invested in renewable energy through the installation of a solar-powered parking canopy consisting of 42 slanted solar panels, each of which produces power equivalent to that required for 0.6 homes while shading the car park.

The designs of Will Bruder for the city of Phoenix (he also designed the Agave branch library, which opened in 2009) are a barometer of the changing face of the American library in the digital age. Named one of Phoenix’s Points of Pride, the library addresses the many needs of the community with its art gallery, program assisting new residents and immigrants, free full-service college planning and private space for teens. The Central Library posits the library as a stalwart but modern institution. Its outstanding features serve to promote the comforts of reading and studying. The magnificent reading room, too, corroborates the library as a place of books and reading.

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Originally published in: Nolan Lushington, Wolfgang Rudorf, Liliane Wong, Libraries: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2016.