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Upper Riccarton Community and School Library
Douglass-Truth Branch of The Seattle Public Library
Hercules Public Library
Minneapolis Central Library
New York Public Library - Mulberry Street Branch
Nishimachi International School, Yashiro Media Center
San Mateo Public Library
Shunde Library
Whitby Public Library & Civic Square
Idea Store WhitechapelHercules Public Library
HGA and Will Bruder strengthen the public heart of a suburban community with a library whose facade boldly meets a busy street.
Unlike its namesake, there is little heroic about Hercules, California: Big-box retail and strip shopping centers line its main roads, and houses sprawl in shades of beige. This suburb in the San Francisco Bay area is, in typical fashion, a privatized world where cars rule; what should be its most public building, the Civic Center, hides like a landscaped office campus on a hill off a main road. The community also lacked a public library until the San Francisco office of Hammel Green and Abrahamson (HGA), in collaboration with Phoenix-based Will Bruder+Partners, was approached to create one.
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Tapping into monies allocated by state library bond measure, the city of Hercules and Contra Costa County commissioned the architects to design a 21,000-square-foot, $10.4 million building that would double as a library and a community center. Open shelving for periodicals, stacks for books and DVDs, open access computers, and reading areas for adults, teens, and children were to be supplemented by a homework center, multipurpose meeting rooms available to public groups, a small kitchen for a coffee shop, and a generous lobby. Additionally, the city requested that the building be highly visible.
HGA and Bruder used the slope of the site and a range of design strategies to give the relatively small building a civic presence and identity while at the same time making it humanly scaled. To bulk up the structure, the architects aggregated the modest program into a single volume and expanded the footprint by inserting a generous, oval-shaped light court into its middle. In section, an asymmetrical butterfly roof shelters a lower wing that modestly faces a parking lot and entry at the rear, and a taller wing that soars to a height of 44 feet above the street corner, perhaps the only building in Hercules to hold the street edge in this way. At this corner, a randomly patterned earth-tone palette of vertical brick tiles clad the exterior of the building’s steel structure, helping the library stand out against its drab neighbors.
Formal name of building:
Hercules Public Library
Location:
Hercules, California
Completion Date: January 2007
Gross square footage: 20,162 sq.ft.
Total project cost: $10.4 million
Owner:
City of Hercules
Architect:
HGA Architects and Engineers
445 Bush St., 4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94108
415-962-2592 phone
415-227-9839 fax
www.hga.com/
will bruder+PARTNERS
2524 North 24th Street
Phoenix, AZ 85008
602-324-6000 tel.
602-324-6001 fax
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