 | MAX WEBBER LIBRARY REVIEW Tom Heneghan
PHOTOGRAPHY John Gollings
| Surprisingly transparent, FJMT’s new library for Blacktown seeks to draw in the community while also expressing the building’s civic function. |
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Looking across Civic
Place to the new Max
Webber Library.
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The library entry
seen from Civic Place,
with entry to the
Westpoint Shopping
Centre to the right. The
transparent louvred
pavilion houses the
main public areas while
the lending collection is
stored in the adjacent
blank-walled building.
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The sunshade
louvres of the first floor
study area.
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Interior view of the
central stair and roof
light in the atrium.
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Looking across the
atrium and library from
the first floor level.
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The open library
facade as seen from the
corner of Flushcombe
Road and Alpha Street.
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The design of the Max Webber Library addresses the
nature of public buildings in contemporary society
and the meaning of this particular type of public
building in generally under-resourced outer suburbs
such as Blacktown in Sydney. Architects FJMT
argue that, as a building type, the library is “the
most meaningful twenty-first-century public
building”. This may be so – although the shopping
mall and art gallery, the usual rivals as the
“twentieth/twenty-first-century cathedral”, might
contest this proposition – but what might this
meaning be? Certainly, the meaning of the
contemporary library is very different from that
of its historic predecessors. At Henri Labrouste’s
Bibliotheque S. Genevieve in Paris (1851), for
example, the entrance was through a thick wall
inscribed with the names of the great authors (with
very little room left for post-1850 writers to be
added to its pantheon) – a Beaux-Arts billboard
announcing the knowledge and culture that reposed
within. It told us exactly where we stood: outside its
portals, regarding it with awe! As with almost all
libraries, it was an entirely introverted building,
focusing on itself and its distinguished contents.
When asked about the heroic, monumental void at
the centre of his otherwise relatively modest Philips
Exeter Library, Louis Kahn explained, “Nobody has
ever paid the price of a book; they pay only for the
printing!” In other words, it was the intangible
knowledge, rather than the physical medium by
which it was disseminated, that was priceless.
The grandiose emptiness of Kahn’s void and the
geometries by which he formed its internal
elevations were gestures of tribute and veneration.
As is the hissed, slapstick shushing that
traditionally enforces silence within a library – not
only to permit quiet reading, but also to proclaim
the reverence in which its contents should be
contemplated.
The Blacktown library is entirely of another
ideology and typology. If it aims to venerate
anything, it is the concept of community access to
knowledge. This is effectively a building without
walls – more akin to a pavilion, or to the market
halls at the centres of medieval villages, which were
open on all sides to invite in the life of the
community. On the three sides that address
surrounding streets, the floor levels of the library are
approximately continuous with the sloping
pavements. Deeply projecting motorized sunshade
louvres allow the ground floor to be enclosed by
clear, un-tinted glazing – very effectively giving the
sense that this is not a separate “public facility”, but
an active part of the life of the public street. In an
economically disadvantaged, multi-ethnic
community that might not entirely be familiar or
at ease with the ways of a library, this library’s
transparency at ground level makes its function,
and its modes of use, easily legible, from all sides,
prior to entry.
Such welcoming transparency is extraordinary
in such a building type, if only because of concerns
about daylight on archived paper, and because the
required run of shelves usually results in racks
across all walls, including the perimeters. Here,
however, archived materials are housed in the
upper, fully sunshaded room, with most of the
borrow-able books beside the “pavilion” in a
blank-walled side wing which abuts the adjacent
car park. This allows the reading room to be fully
glazed, bright, open, casual, unobtrusively
supervised, and centred on a sculpturally prismatic
grand stairway. The stairway serves as something of
a visual lure, which directs attention through an
elliptical void to the upper level, and the
Aalto-esque rooflights that spill controlled daylight
throughout both floor levels. Unlike the sacred
emptiness of Kahn’s symbolic void, FJMT’s library
is centred on the movements of the visiting public.
The immense simplicity of this proposition is
characteristic of the diagrams that underlay each of
FJMT’s works. In the practice’s competition entries
their design strategy often seems so obvious that one
wonders why the other competitors were blind to it.
It appears effortless – a sign of the intense effort that
leads to that point. The work demonstrates an
extraordinary ability to uncover the real and often
contradictory issues and potentials of a project by
a very careful analysis of purpose and place, and
to resolve these in a building of ease and elegance
which represents only itself and its users.
At Blacktown, however, there was little by way
of physical context to which to respond. The
horizontal sunshade louvres on the upper floor can
be seen to echo their vertical equivalents on the
adjacent council offices, across Alpha Street to the
east, and the separation of the building into an
elevated, floating screened part and a lower visual
void breaks down the scale of the library volume
and balances it with the single-storey historic
schoolhouse to its north. But the “elephant” with
which the library is obliged to share a bed is the
massive adjacent Westpoint Shopping Centre, where
flat retail floor-trays span across two blocks of
Blacktown with no concession to the undulating
terrain. The descending plaza (not by FJMT), which
has consequently been required to lead down from
Alpha Street to the shopping centre entrance,
effectively raises the library onto a plinth, with a
stair running across the full width of its facade.
This separates the library from the plaza and gives it
some of the sense of aloofness that FJMT had taken
so many pains to avoid. It is particularly disruptive
because the design of this building is an essay in
appropriate symbolism, carefully balancing the need
to express a sense of civitas – as a representation of
the community – with the need to be understood by
the community as simply an ordinary part of their
ordinary life, and to entice inside those for whom a
library would not ordinarily be a place of resort.
This is not a formerly refined Georgian suburb
such as Peckham in London, where Will Alsop’s
similarly sized public library is designed as
spectacle, to draw in the curious and the baffled.
Blacktown is a suburb relatively free of former or
contemporary examples of quality architecture, and
there is no sense of faded civic decorum with which
to contrast. FJMT has therefore been obliged to
create the language of an appropriate civic
architecture virtually from scratch. And it is a
benevolent and accessible notion of civic
architecture. This is carefully judged narrative
space-making which suggests regard for community
and communal knowledge. The popularity of the
building is evident. On Sunday mornings, queues
form ten minutes before opening time. Although –
inevitably in these days – many head for the
library’s large broadband-connected computer room
to check their email, many come to browse and to
generally relax in what is effectively a generously
scaled, thoughtfully detailed, warm-toned, brightly
day-lit and relaxed public living room. It is a
generous civic building of no pretensions. There is
circumstance, but no pomp. This is a description of
most FJMT buildings. With the exception of the
curiously eccentric Teaching and Administration
Building at Edith Cowan University, FJMT’s
buildings usually manage to be simultaneously
monumental and self-effacing because of their
ambiguous scaling – sometimes larger in gesture
than is consistent with the smaller scale of their
physical form. One might think, for example, of
their recent extensions at The Mint in Sydney. The
success of the Blacktown library – which required
responses to many very different sensibilities and
agendas – lies in the richness of this ambiguity. It is
both heroic and intimate, civic space and
community space – respectful of both the books and
their readers.
TOM HENEGHAN IS PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY.
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MAX WEBBER
LIBRARY,
BLACKTOWN
Architect Francis-Jones
Morehen Thorp—
project director Richard
Thorp; design director
Richard Francis-Jones;
project team leader
Lance White; project
team Aya Maceda
Kalaw, Janine Deshon,
John Morris, Andrew
Chung, Boris
Manzewski, Matthew
Mar, Olivia Shih,
Nikolce Dunoski, Peter
Wise. Project manager
Blacktown City Council.
Structural and civil
consultant Taylor
Thomson Whitting.
Mechanical and
electrical consultant
Steensen Varming.
Hydraulic consultant
Warren Smith &
Partners. Lighting and
services consultant
Steensen Varming
(Australia). Interior
design Francis-Jones
Morehen Thorp.
Landscape architect
Pittendrigh Shinkfield
Bruce. Acoustic
consultant Arup
Acoustics. Quantity
surveyor Rider Hunt.
BCA consultant
McKenzie Group
Consulting. Fire
engineering Warrington
Fire Research. Client
Blacktown City Council.
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