Redcliffs Library by Young Architects

ArchiPro Project Summary - Redcliffs Library: A community-focused design that symbolizes the essence of literature, featuring architectural metaphors that reflect the journey of a book, while serving as a beacon of knowledge and resilience for the community.

Title:: Redcliffs Library
Architect:: Young Architects
Category:: Community/; Public and Cultural
Photographers:: Lightforge Photography

Redcliffs Village Library is a community library, designed to replace the library that was destroyed in the 2011 earthquakes.

The design was carried out in close consultation with the community who manage it, and to meet the maintenance requirements of the Christchurch City Council who own it.

As befitting a library, the design is full of metaphors:

The roofing and cladding represents the dust cover of a book, with the spine and edge refected in the curved flashings. The white ends of the building represent the pages of a book. The clear strip on the Main Road elevation has two purposes: It gives more transparency than the semi-opaque polycarbonate, telegraphing a new visitors arrival as they move past it It also represents the gap in the pages of a book, if the book was stood up on its edge in a similar way to the form of the building The polycarbonate street gable is back-lit to glow at night time, in a similar way to a lighthouse. In this sense, the lighthouse symbolizes: Guidance, and the ability to weather a storm A beacon of civilisation and education The reception counter is designed to represent books between two book ends.

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