 | MILLENNIUM LIBRARY Donovan Hill and Peddle Thorp
rework Robin Gibson’s State
Library of Queensland edifice.
REVIEW PAUL WALKER
PHOTOGRAPHY JON LINKINS
| The State Library of Queensland is both a research
library of ‘last resort’ and a flagship facility for the
entire Queensland library system. The redeveloped
building skilfully negotiates these two roles, helping
to reinvent the library as an institution and suggesting
new forms of public building. |
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Entry elevation
to the State Library of
Queensland, facing
Stanley Place.
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View over the
open-air atrium,
towards the entry,
from the first floor.
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Looking into
the entry slot, with
its accumulating
patterned green
concrete elements.
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Beautifully
crafted timber
cabinets, racks and a
large table encourage
passers-by to linger in
the open atrium.
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At each end
the atrium slot is
indicated by large
formal gestures, which
suggest alternative
ways of traversing
the site. Seen here is
the opening in the
south-east elevation,
which faces the
Queensland Cultural
Centre.
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Overview from
the south, showing the
new part of the library
and site infrastructure
works, with GoMA to
the left. The framed
space on the front
corner is a sheltered
terrace, with mirrored
ceiling and cabinets
housing a collection of
teacups.
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River elevation,
with Robin Gibson’s
Queensland Art
Gallery to the left.
The new work fits into
and above Gibson’s
tiered library.
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The entry
elevation. The screens
appear opaque in
some light conditions,
translucent in others.
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The south-east
elevation, facing
the Queensland
Cultural Centre. The
beige concrete of the
existing library is to
the right, with the new
work above and left.
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The new
atrium, a “truly public
interior space”. Neither
inside the institution
nor part of the exterior,
the atrium is open
to the elements and
suggests a new kind
of accessibility on the
part of the institution.
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A double-height
reading room, located
on the river’s edge,
has been created by
pushing the building
envelope out where
the original stepped in.
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Library spaces
accommodated within
the volumes of the
original building, with
its low floor-to-ceiling
heights.
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The Philip
Bacon Heritage Gallery.
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Looking
along the edge of
the double-height
reading room.
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The Talking
Circle, part of the kuril
dhagun Indigenous
Knowledge Centre,
on the building’s
north side.
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Interior of the
Talking Circle, which
includes a hearth for
lighting fires.
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The external
river decks, accessible
from within the
library, under the
oldest poinciana tree
on public land in
Queensland.
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Looking along
the new boardwalk on
the river’s edge, with
the Red Box projecting
beyond the original
stepped form, and new
office spaces behind
glass screens above.
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Interior of
the Red Box, with
its contemplative
framing of the river
surface. The space also
provides an internal
link between the two
levels of the State
Reference Library.
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The new concrete surfaces of the State Library of
Queensland building are mostly green. There is a
box on the northern facade of the building where the
concrete is red, inside and out. And the visible concrete
work of the 1980s carapace, on which Donovan Hill and
Peddle Thorp have done their thing, retains the beige
of the rest of the South Bank arts citadel. But it is the
green – several shades, dominating the lower levels of
the building exterior – that takes you by surprise and
keeps surprising as you look at it again. They really made
it green? (Well, you couldn’t have a blue building, the
architect cryptically says. Huh?) The pigment is disposed
across the concrete in smallish rectangular zones. They
are a bit blurry at their edges.
The concrete is the main exterior building material,
especially on that part of the library adjacent to the
new approaches to South Bank from Stanley Place. The
concrete work is rough; it bears various imprints from
the construction process, a pattern quite distinct from
that organizing the green. Colour, then, disguises the
marks of building that might be otherwise construed as
imperfections, but not in the usual way of architecture
now: to feign perfection with sheets of glass or
Alucobond or (especially in Queensland) screens of
timber battens. The green is as imperfect as the concrete.
The veiling it achieves is modest; it works by multiplying
details or imperfections to render each one of them
unimportant. Or rather, blemish and embellishment
become indistinguishable. This gives the building an
indeterminate look but one which is also mesmerizing.
The deployment of green exemplifies the lateral
approaches to design throughout this building.
Everywhere, a kind of anti-monumental monumentality
is attempted and mostly it is significantly achieved.
There is a frank acceptance of the constraints of brief,
site and an assertive existing building. But the care
that these things called for – and the expectation that
the architecture of such a significant institution be
something – is worn by the building with grace.
Somewhere there had to be a big blank box for
collection storage. It has been raised off the ground as
the upper portion of the library building that is entirely
new. This entails a lot of structural work and blind walls
but also makes the lower levels available for people.
Furthermore, it establishes a large scale. The strategy of
the gauzy green adorning the concrete is echoed
by the more explicit veiling of copper fins and vertical
translucent strips that surround the upper levels on
this side of the building. This screen maintains scale
and singularity – it lets the volume of the accumulated
library collections literally be the monument – but again
it profuses detail. It casts shadows; it dissolves edges;
it appears to change with light conditions through the
day, and at night as it is variously illuminated. It is often
quite beautiful.
The site organization of South Bank’s new precinct
is apparently driven by a desire to connect as directly
as possible the old Queensland Art Gallery and the
new Gallery of Modern Art. This disavows the previous
pattern of movement indicated along the riverside
terraces. The place of the library in this new logic
is frankly subsidiary (which says something about
institutional hierarchies that is even more overt in the
longstanding exile of the Queensland Museum at the
arse-end of the art gallery). The library is apprehended
as a (rather fuzzy) monumental mass arrayed with the
other monuments either side of it in a public space
orchestrated as a massive architectural display. But
through the proliferation of incident close up, the
multiplication of scales without hierarchy, the building
becomes intimate. Inside, it suggests that a different
attitude to public space is also being proffered. Or rather,
its dissolution of the inside/outside distinction suggests
this. Between the part of the library building built on the
old and the part new from the ground up is a high atrium
whose scale contrasts with the relatively low void that
signage indicates is the main approach. Gathered around
this atrium is a cafe, a bookshop, a part of the library
that houses both a new electronic Infozone and the kuril
dhagun Indigenous Knowledge Centre that needs must
be as accessible as possible, and – separately – a reception
area and public entry point to those parts of the library
on upper levels that require substantial security. They
include an auditorium, exhibition spaces, reading rooms
for those using conventional library materials, and
heritage collections. The Indigenous centre connects to a
“talking circle” outside the building on the north-western
side, delineated with complex formal and iconographic
elements.
The atrium is a truly public interior space, inside the
building but not yet inside an institution or commercial
entity, not part of the exterior but directly connected to
it. The atrium has balconies accommodating circulation
between various parts of the library, and thus as you walk
around the place you move in and out of spaces with
different kinds of ambient qualities. But it is the public
gesture of the atrium that is really interesting: while the
library proper can be closed when the atrium remains
open, the atrium’s openness suggests a new propensity to
accessibility in the institution of the State Library itself.
The library has indeed taken rebuilding as an opportunity
to make itself more accessible, from the Infozone electronic
access on Level 1 to the open access to significant heritage
collections on Level 4. And the atrium is very open, sliced
from one end to the other by a high slot of space that
can be traversed by pedestrians, joggers, cyclists. Perhaps
it does not visually offer them what they expect such an
august institution should, but, more importantly, it might
nevertheless lend itself to becoming part of their routines.
Along with the cafe and shop, various appropriately scaled
furnishings may make them linger – a beautifully crafted
timber rack for pamphlets, a cabinet containing illuminated
lists of library benefactors, a large table.
These things have a domestic air – the atrium is a sort
of anteroom akin to the indeterminate spaces in some
Donovan Hill houses. There are other elements in the
library design that have a displaced but homely quality.
In front of the building is a gigantic billboard featuring
a wallpaperish pattern of leaves at two different scales.
While we might at first be reminded of Herzog and de
Meuron, the recurrence of this pattern in the pink carpet
found inside the building suggests suburban lounges and
bedrooms. There is also a place for the best china from the
old front room: a deep, high, sheltered terrace connected to
the Level 2 auditorium features cabinets built into the side
walls to house a collection of delicate teacups. Whimsical
perhaps, but perhaps also a not-so-whimsical assertion
about the deportments public buildings entail: familiar or
recuperated comforts need not be excluded.
But the propositions made here are not just about
intimacy and intricacy. From the sides of the building,
the atrium slot is signalled by large formal gestures that
suggest that these are really the principal entries to the
building. This implies that the overall site organization of
this new part of South Bank might have offered a public
domain configured differently: not as residual space
between spectacular architectural objects, but instead as
a spatial sequence through and between buildings, with
opportunities for public urbanity – tea, coffee and all
– within the very project of public building.
Expanding scale is also at stake in the transformations
to the Robin Gibson part of the complex. Located here are
public access to library collections and information sources
– electronic, conventional print and special materials – and
library work areas. The floor-to-floor dimensions are meagre
as only limited demolition was possible (mostly to raze
the upper-level connection to the terraces in front of the
art gallery that used to be the means of public entry to the
library). However, a double-height reading room has been
made by pushing the building envelope out where the
concrete terraces of the original building used to recede at
the middle of the riverfront facade. Decks on Level 1 also
step out toward the river beyond the old building envelope,
and there are no security reasons to stop them being
completely external. These decks have wonderful spaces,
especially one under a gloriously spreading poinciana.
The effects of the changes to Gibson’s original are more
sympathetic visually than this description might suggest.
An allusion can be seen in the roof-line of Gibson’s South
Bank complex to the profile of the ranges visible in the far
distance to the south-west. While the additions made to the
riverfront and top of the State Library do not maintain the
line or the visual weight of the original, or the dominance
of the concrete terraces that perhaps reflected hill forms,
the tectonic lightness of the additions is a better strategy
than trying to mimic the old. The changed appearance of
the library from across the river suggests a softening, which
itself could be construed as an extension of the landscape
metaphor in the original, as if vegetation or perhaps clouds
have shrouded it and made its outline less distinct.
However, it is the attention of the new architecture to
the closer view that is most compelling. As the Red Box on
the building’s river frontage makes apparent, this is not
just a matter of looking at the architecture, but also from it.
The interior of this volume is set up as an intimate, stepped
auditorium, with a low strip of windows configured to give
a view of the moving surface of the river adjacent. With the
broader context of the usual view framed out, we look at the
water’s surface as something new and beguiling.
Dr Paul Walker is associate professor of architecture
at the University of Melbourne.
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| MILLENNIUM LIBRARY,
SITE INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS,
FF&E AND FOUNDATION ENHANCEMENTS,
QUEENSLAND CULTURAL CENTRE |
Architect
Donovan Hill Peddle
Thorp architects
in association—
principal architects
Timothy Hill
Brian Donovan
Frank Way
project team
Jeffrey Briant, Brett
Hudson, Damian
Eckersley, Lucas Leo,
Mark Floate, Greg
Lamb, Fedor Medek,
George Taran, Ron van
Sluys, Ines Hallmond,
Graham Mudge,
Graham Hobbs,
Rosario Distaco,
David Evans, Mark
Damant, Seth Remaut,
Tanya McLachlan, Phil
Hindmarsh, Kevin
O’Brien, Michael
Hogg, Lisa Matray,
Yee Chong, Louise
Hamilton, Paul Jones,
Michael Moore, Chris
Hing Fay, Ceirwen
Burton, Ben Killeen,
Eden Norris, Stephanie
Donigi, Michael Rasi,
Gary Cannon
Client
State Library
of Queensland.
Project manager
Project Services,
Queensland
Department of Public
Works.
Managing contractor
Bovis Lend Lease.
Structural, civil
and traffic consultant
Arup.
Mechanical
consultant
Lincolne Scott.
Electrical, fire, security,
communications,
and hydraulic services
Connell Wagner.
Lift consultant
TDC.
Specialist lighting
(SIW) Vision Lighting.
Acoustic consultant
ERM.
Environmental
consultant
AEC.
Equitable access
consultant
DAC.
Landscape consultant
EDAW Gillespies.
Wayfinding
consultant
dotdash.
Audiovisual
consultant
Point of View.
Pre-novation
consultants
Quantity surveyor
Rawlinsons.
Programming
consultant
RCP.
Building surveyor
McKenzie Group.
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