![]() Visually light and transparent, the resulting 8,700-square-foot “park pavilion” has the openness of a community living room. “Not building along an edge,” Bishop points out, “meant not privileging one neighborhood over another.” The city initially favored a prominent position on the boulevard bordering the park, but the architects made a persuasive case for a pavilion-like library near its center. There were appeals to make the design “culturally specific to a particular group,” recalls KE principal Nathan Bishop, “but we convinced them that a culturally universal approach would be more inclusive, encouraging all different people to take on the library as their own.”Įven the siting within the park was a point of debate. Through a series of open public meetings, supplemented by a survey, the city sought neighborhood input on the programming, design, and precise location. “Creating this library was a very community-driven process,” says Eizenberg. Not merely a venue for recreation and a weekly farmers' market, their green space offered common ground for neighborhood pockets of contrasting urban densities, housing typologies, and ethnicities (among them Latino, African-American, and Japanese). ![]() “Clearly, this library needed to reengage the community.” The broad challenges were already familiar to her firm, which had created the park in 2006, with landscape architects Spurlock Poirier. Set within the 9.5-acre Virginia Avenue Park, the site lies “at the heart of an underachieving area with the lowest high school performance in the city,” says KE principal Julie Eizenberg.
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