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RADAR
FEATURES
COMMENT
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| | NARELLAN LIBRARY REVIEW Laura Harding
PHOTOGRAPHY Tyrone Brannigan
| Group GSA’s Narellan Library and Community Centre is a generous beginning to a new civic centre in an area undergoing rapid change. |
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The playful Elyard
Street frontage of the
Narellan Library, which
provides access to the
community and youth
services wing of the
building. The three-dimensional
“library”
supergraphic encloses
an outdoor area for a
cafe.
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The new public
plaza on the Elyard
Street edge.
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Interior view of the
Queen Street entry to
the library.
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Librarian’s desk.
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A computer hub
within the main library
space.
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Looking
towards the “glass
prism” of the main
library space from the
surrounding parklands.
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The bold brickwork
gives a civic presence to
the Queen Street facade.
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In Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,
when Robert Venturi expressed a liking for “hybrid
rather than ‘pure’, compromising rather than ‘clean’,
distorted rather than ‘straightforward’, ambiguous
rather than ‘articulated’, perverse as well as
impersonal, boring as well as ‘interesting’,
conventional rather than ‘designed’”, he could not
have anticipated its relevance more than forty years
later to the developing character of the burgeoning
regional centres of Australia’s towns and cities.
The township of Narellan on the south-western
fringe of Sydney is a case in point and the site of a
recently completed library and youth centre by
Group GSA Architects. The library is the first
architectural component of an ambitious reworking
of the town centre being undertaken by Camden
Council. As such, it has become an important
symbol of council’s commitment to revitalization
of the centre and the pursuit of change. But the
building’s prescience has posed some particularly
difficult questions for the architecture – what is an
appropriate architectural expression for a project
that will form the heart of a centre which does not
yet exist, and how do we reconcile the pristine
visage of revitalization with the quirky, lingering
imperfection of the present?
Narellan has seen considerable change over
the past decade that has irrevocably altered the
character of the former rural outpost. Ringed by
rampant suburban development, it is now
completely detached from its Arcadian rural setting.
The white noise of passing traffic on the Camden
Valley Way is punctuated regularly by the groaning
deceleration of articulated vehicles and the hiss of
air brakes. A major retail shopping centre has
obliterated the block to the north of the library site,
presenting a relentless wall of weary precast
concrete and loading docks towards the library and
a tangled mess of truck ramps and car parking to its
remaining frontages. The ultramarine and red stripes
of that now ubiquitous suburban landmark, the
hardware depot, beckon to the east across a small
natural watercourse which is marked by a mature
stand of remnant Cumberland Plain woodland.
So it is with a Venturian generosity of vision and
a willing suspension of the “pure”, “clean” and
“straightforward” that Group GSA have found
a foothold in the development of a new civic
disposition for the township. Squinting past the dire
retail wasteland opposite and drawing on the energy
and ambition of a lively local working group and the
evolving plans for the town centre, the library has
selected its terms of reference carefully, identifying
two elements as the points from which to stitch
together an urban potential – the site’s strategic
corner location on the future “main street” and its
proximity to the adjacent eucalypts and parkland.
The new library room is a pragmatically detailed
glass prism with an overhanging silver cap that
draws the adjacent eucalypts deep into the space, its
vertical mullion pattern playing rhythmically
against the scattered tree trunks in the park.
Generous illumination is provided by industrial
skylight units and a simple folded plasterboard
ceiling that distributes a delicate, mutable light
throughout the room. The library is well appointed
and well used by scores of children – reading
stories, browsing the internet or momentarily
forgetting themselves while donning enormous
headphones and singly loudly at music stations.
Oblivious to their teacher’s calls to walk s-l-o-w-l-y
in the library, they race at breakneck speed to
occupy cherished places on the mats in the
children’s area, past older citizens who wriggle into
comfortable armchairs in the quiet sanctuary of the
periodical room, immersing themselves in the
day’s news.
Budget cuts resulted in proposed sunshading
elements on the northern facade being removed and
the building now struggles with the unintended heat
load from a large expanse of glazing that opens the
room to a serpentine public gathering space and
amphitheatre. This area will decisively interlock the
parklands with the building as the landscape
matures and will form a focus for civic ceremonies
and events.
The Queen Street elevation uses crisply finished
brickwork to anchor the composition and evoke a
more substantial civic gravitas on its primary urban
frontage. Thick brick walls, a raw concrete stair
and unassuming brick paving lend the wing a
comfortable and tactile municipal scale, but a
limited number of openings and the presence of a
substantial brick podium give the building an
unnecessarily introverted relationship to the street.
A more generous public route infiltrates the building
from the Elyard Street frontage through the new
public gathering space, providing access to the
community and youth services wing of the building.
Here the architects have engaged playfully with the
over-scaled graphic language of the retail elements
surrounding the site, rather than attempting to
impose a more staid civic decorum. Clad in vivid
red glazing, it features seraphic glass panels with
motifs developed by a public artist working
collaboratively with local students. Library is spelt
out in jaunty three-dimensional supergraphics that
will eventually enclose the outdoor seating area of
a cafe space that opens onto the new public square.
So how can we reconcile a pristine vision with
imperfect reality? Group GSA suggest that it is not
through the imposition of a complete and polished
architectural setpiece but through a more equivocal
weaving of distinctive elements. An assemblage of
parts that in more urbane contexts may have formed
a jarring pastiche here create an open, generative
diagram that offers much freedom and scope to
future works in the centre.
While the procurement process has hampered
the tectonic resolution of the constituent parts of the
Narellan Library, to dwell on these shortcomings
would be to miss the more salient architectural
point. In embracing complexity, Group GSA have
posited a vital and optimistic present and future for
the Narellan Town Centre. As Venturi insisted all
that time ago, “it must embody the difficult unity of
inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.
More is not less.”
LAURA HARDING IS AN ARCHITECT WITH HILL THALIS
ARCHITECTURE + URBAN PROJECTS.
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NARELLAN LIBRARY
AND COMMUNITY
CENTRE
Architect Group GSA—
design director Stephen
Pearse; project team—
Sally Sutherland,
Warren Meadley, Nigel
Reading, Elka
Hulskamp, Isabel
Rodriguez, Augustin
Rubbens, Tilman Weiss.
Project manager Total
Urban Projects.
Structural consultant
Tierney Opus. Electrical
and mechanical
consultant Simpson
Kotzman. Landscape
consultant Spackman
Mossop. Interior
designer Group GSA.
Acoustic consultant
PKA Acoustic
Consulting. Quantity
consultant Davis
Langdon Australia.
Builder Richard Crookes
Construction. Art
consultant Guppy &
Associates. DDA
consultant Disability
Access Consultants.
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Copyright © 2010 Architecture Media Pty Ltd
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