Information Services Building
Dunedin, New Zealand
Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates

A highly dramatic gateway for a new kind of library on an old campus

© John Gollings

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

By Elizabeth Arcuri

A picturesque collection of stone-front Victorian buildings gives a strong identity to the core of the University of Otago, founded in 1868 on a peninsula of the South Island of New Zealand. Between 1960 and 1980, however, bland clusters of concrete structures along the southern part of the campus altered the gestalt. Now Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer’s (HHPA) 200,000-square-foot Information Services Building (ISB) launches a third and more inspiring generation of development. Sited on a highly public corner at the southwest edge of the campus, the building proclaims its function as a gateway to the university and its symbolic role as a center for learning.

In planning the building, the university staff visited a number of American libraries, including the Los Angeles Central Library, which had been renovated and expanded in 1993 by HHPA’s Los Angeles office. The client group was particularly impressed by the way the library’s atrium solved the problem of getting natural light into a large space. Soon HHPA’s Los Angeles office, headed by partner Norman Pfeiffer, FAIA, with Stephen Johnson, AIA, the principal architect, was commissioned to develop Otago’s l996 master plan as well as design the ISB. The Los Angeles Library and ISB projects are drastically different in style. The former expansion defers heavily to the Moorish Deco style of the historic Bertram Goodhue building (1926); at ISB, HHPA felt the design should explore (and improve upon) the Modernist idiom of the adjoining university buildings with gridded glass and curved metal forms.

The $35 million ISB renovation and expansion called for demolishing about a third of the existing 1960s Central Library (soundly built but deficient in space and afflicted
with outdated systems) and constructing the new library to extend beyond the original footprint. The base of the new construction is a poured-in-place concrete grid, while a double-T-slab construction is used above. The remaining two thirds of the 1960s library was drastically remodeled: The interior was gutted to accommodate the information (computer) commons, and the exterior glazed to match the curtain wall of the adjacent new counterpart. In addition, HHPA renovated the exterior of nearby buildings and created a glass-enclosed passage between the ISB and the existing student union.

The transparency of ISB’s exterior is carried into the open-plan interior. The atrium at the heart of the center is given a strong shape by a curved Oamaru stone wall: At the plaza level, the wall separates the secure zone for the collections (over 400,000 books and 300,000 microformat volumes) from the 24-hour reading area and the information commons. Open stairways and well-spaced concrete columns augment the feeling of expansiveness, which in turn is underscored by the use of translucent materials of glass, perforated metal, and wire mesh.

See the August 2002 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project.

Formal name of Project:
Information Services Building,
University of Otago

Location:
Dunedin, New Zealand

Gross square footage:
200,000 sq. ft.

Total construction cost:
$20 million

Client:
University of Otago

Architect:
Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates
811 West 7th Street, Suite 430
Los Angeles, CA 90017
T:213-624-2775
F:213-895-0923
www.hhpa.com