Profile

San Francisco Main Public Library

San Francisco, California
Completed 1996

Lead Designer: James Ingo Freed

State-of-the-art public library
 

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This public library was designed to complete San Francisco's Civic Center, perhaps the finest example of the City Beautiful movement in America. It echoes with a modernist attitude the materials and massing of neighboring Beaux-Arts institutions, fronting on the Civic Center with two symmetrical façades. The library's two other facades make a contemporary response to the adjacent commercial district.

The design is organized to permit passage into and through the building and out to the opposite side of the full-block site. The Library is thus both a destination and a link connecting the modern city with its cultural core, a bridge between the people of San Francisco and the institutions that serve and enrich them.

Internal organization centers around a monumental open staircase and a five-story atrium, 60 feet in diameter, that provides a luminous hub of orientation. A glass-enclosed Periodicals Reading Room, suspended above, further helps to draw light into the core of the 300' x 200' building. Bridges link the different precincts and reinforce the metaphor of connection in a library that provides access to both advanced online information systems and more than three million books on open/closed stacks. The New Main attempts to integrate the different people, interests, and precincts of the city, both traditionally and electronically, physically and symbolically, now and well into the future.

Major Components

32 miles open / closed books stacks; 300 terminals, 500 on-line ports; 80' high public atrium (3,700 s/f circular component only); Monumental Stair; 5,700 s/f Periodicals Reading Room; Special Collections (8 rooms @ 1,100 s/f each), 3,550 s/f auditorium (620 seats), public meeting rooms, exhibition spaces, roof garden, café, bookstore, commissioned art (Alice Aycock Stair, Nayland Blake Installation, Ann Hamilton and Ann Chamberlain Installation, Charley Brown and Mark Evans ceiling mural)

Awards

Pei Cobb Freed & Partners services

Complete Architectural Services (excluding Children's Library); Construction documents for public areas, curtain wall, skylights, custom cabinets & interior; coordination with associate  architect on construction documents and construction administration

Associate Architect

Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris, San Francisco, CA

Structural

OLMM Structural Design

Seismic

Forell/Elsesser Engineers

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