New Bronx Main Library

[ASchwarz]

http://www.bronxmall.com/norwoodnews/past/061903/news/page2.html

Designs for New Fordham Library Unveiled

By WILLIAM WICHERT

Next to Tuff City Tattoos, and just up the block from a bustling Fordham Road, a new glass-enclosed building with a frisbee-shaped roof will soon stand four stories tall. This is the vision for the new Bronx Borough Center Library, the highly anticipated, and energy-efficient replacement for the Fordham Library Center on Bainbridge Avenue.

The new library will more than double the size of the overcrowded Fordham branch, which was built in 1923 and renovated twice since. Designed by Richard Dattner & Partners Architects, the new building will increase the number of computer workstations and the size of the current book collections while adding a new auditorium and a Latino and Puerto Rican Cultural Center.

The increased space will allow for an expansion of programs currently
available at the Fordham Library. Residents will be able to take part in
the library's adult literacy classes through the Center for Reading and
Writing and the English for Speakers of Other Languages courses.
Fledgling entrepreneurs may utilize the technology training and research
materials aimed at small business owners.

The Bronx Borough Center Library will also set a precedent as the first "green building" in the library system. Many of the 34 Bronx libraries have undergone some renovations in the past, but the new library will utilize modern technologies to conserve energy, saving the library thousands of dollars in the process.

Advanced sensors will automatically provide light and air ventilation, depending on the conditions in a particular area of the building. Seating near the glass facade will be flooded in natural light without accumulating any extra heat. At every level, a light shelf will bounce the sunlight up towards the ceiling so that light may be brought deeper into the building.

"It's not a super high-tech building. It's just common sense using existing technologies," said Daniel Heuberger, a co-designer of the new library, which is modeled on current buildings in Germany. European countries began utilizing energy-efficient methods after the oil crisis in 1973, but the United States has only begun experimenting with energy conservation in the last 10 years, Heuberger said.

Construction is set to begin next January, after 15 years of searching for the money and a place to build. A site for the building became available in 2001, when the New York Public Library acquired the former Con Edison building on Kingsbridge Road near Fordham Road. The funding for this $50 million project soon followed through the cooperative efforts of various state and city officials as well as a private donation from a library trustee.

While the NYPL's capital budget has seen a nearly 30 percent cut over the past year, funding has remained intact for what is expected to be "an important architectural addition to the Bronx," said Mary Elizabeth Wendt, associate director of the branch libraries.

The technologies in the Bronx Borough Center may be invisible to the untrained eye, but Heuberger hopes that the building itself will increase the public's awareness of such energy-efficient possibilities. While he understands that one building cannot save the world, he believes that "it's the addition of building after building after building that will start to make a difference."

[billyblancoNYC]

Why would they knock down a decent looking building that seems to be in pretty good shape. Wouldn't it make more sense to replace some decrepid buildings instead?

[Kris]

Yes, but you seem to assume that even one of the most thriving areas of the Bronx has an abundance of expendable buildings. Location is crucial for such an institution and there were probably few site options. I do agree that it looks like a waste, especially given the replacement's apparently banal design.

"Green" appears to be a label sought by average architects who still crave the distinction of being considered innovative.

[billyblancoNYC]

While the design is not "bad," it also seems, along with "green" that the use of clear glass in any way is cutting-edge, innovative design. *While many times this may be true, it is definitely not the rule.

[TLOZ Link5]

That rendering just reminded me of how much we criticized Pedersen/Littenberg for showing their WTC plans in watercolors.

[Kris]

http://aiany.org/designawards/2003/projects/jpegs/263a.jpg
http://www.aiany.org/designawards/2003/projects/jpegs/263b.jpg
http://www.aiany.org/designawards/2003/projects/jpegs/263c.jpg

http://aiany.org/designawards/2003/projects/proj6.htm

[Kris]

The architects' site shows a slightly lighter version:

http://www.dattner.com/html/images/univ5a.jpg

http://www.dattner.com/html/frameuniv5.html

[krulltime]

Wow...new libraries today are sure looking great so far! Not like the old versions where there was less natural light and more walls. :)

[Kris]

Construction photos: http://www.nypl.org/branch/local/bx/blc.html

[macreator]

While the architecture isn't groundbreaking -- the final product -- as seen in the NYPL construction pics link posted above -- looks fantastic. The glass seems really nice -- not cheap like I was expecting -- and the curve at the top looks really neat.

I think we came out of this with a very nice building that, best of all, will be serving the public good and not just a few rich guys who can buy a condo inside.

[czsz]

Wow, that is rather well done...I'm amazed the city sank that muchmoney and attention to detail into a project in the Bronx.

[antinimby]

Yeah, but look at what was lost:
http://www.bronxmall.com/norwoodnews/past/061903/news/ylibrary1.jpg

You'd think that with all the dumps there are in the Bronx they could've razed, instead they chosed this one. Couldn't they have gutted the old building, fix it up and use it as the library?

[Stern]

Its okay, its not nearly as nice as the Flushing Library.

http://www.polshek.com/images/921717.jpg

http://www.polshek.com/images/921716.jpg

http://www.polshek.com/images/921720.jpg

http://www.polshek.com/images/921722.jpg

http://www.polshek.com/images/921724.jpg

http://www.polshek.com/images/921736.jpg

[czsz]

True, that's probably the best library branch (save perhaps the one in Brooklyn).

[elfgam]

It's just nice to see these libraries becoming civic anchors for their respective communities.

[stache]

Brooklyn and Queens librarys are not part of the Bronx/Manhattan/Staten Island library system.

[Edward]

January 10, 2006 Edition
Checking Out The Bronx's New Library
Architecture

BY JAMES GARDNER
January 10, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/25597
The spanking-new Bronx Library Center that will open a week from today looks decidedly out of context at the intersection of East Kingsbridge Road and Briggs Avenue, a stone's throw from East Fordham Road. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is not easy to define what that context is. Because it has long been one of the least affluent regions of New York, this area is full of three- and four-story houses that have not changed over the last 100 years and which are crammed at street level with every manner of mom-and-pop establishment. East Fordham Road meanders from west to east like London's Kensington High Street or several other high streets in the sundry districts of that capital, but where it intersects Grand Concourse Avenue, suddenly you are in Lima, Peru. There is a seedy glory to this monster of a boulevard, a discordant collision of early-20th-century folies de grandeur and six subsequent decades of malign neglect. If you are feeling nostalgic for that vanished New York of the postwar years, or of the decrepit 1960s, or of a pre-Disneyfied Times Square, rest assured that it's alive and well in this part of the Bronx.
Into this context, the new library has alighted like a flying saucer in a cornfield. Designed by Richard Dattner, it is clearly the most glamorous thing to happen to the neighborhood in years. I would guess there is nothing like it within a three-mile radius.
A five-story structure built along the ascending bias of Briggs Avenue, its bulk is a fairly orthodox Modernist affair, a pristine glass box. At street level and on the south side, it is accented with rust-colored stone cladding. The northern end, though similarly clad, rises as a turret whose summit consists of those ever-elegant brise-soleil striations that are so much in fashion these days. They are the best thing not only here but in the new Bloomberg Tower on Lexington Avenue and 59th Street, and in Philip Johnson's recent Metropolitan, a residential tower on Third Avenue and 90th Street.
From one end of the building to the other is a looping, sharply angled roof that rises above a slightly recessed top floor and reveals, I believe, Mr. Dattner's long-standing in volvement with the design of infrastructure. It recalls anything but the typology of a public library: Pioneered by Pier Luigi Nervi in Rome's Termini train station, this roof design has been revived in SOM's recently completed Terminal One at John F. Kennedy International Air port and in William Nicholas Boudova & Associates's new West Midtown Ferry Terminal.
The slick, streamlined horizontality of the Bronx Library is emphasized further at ground level by a raking canopy whose granite-gray geometry has, like the rest of the building, impeccable High Modernist credentials. In fact, it is difficult to put your finger on any element of this building that would seem substantially out of place in the context of orthodox 1960s architectural practice. The composite, perhaps, is a little more varied than standard '60s fare, and the manufacture of the parts, together with the use of materials, is far more sensitive than was true back then. But beyond that, there is little to orient us in the present architectural moment.
Though I was not able to gain a thorough sense of the interior, I can say that the Modernist logic of the exterior appears to be fully respected inside the building as well. Each floor consists of an expansive and undivided space articulated only by a few uninflected pylons that have been standard fare since Le Corbusier. Meanwhile, the main reception area consists of a dramatic green drum suspended from the ceiling in such a way as to channel the spirit of mid-century Modernists like Alvar Aalto.
Though Mr. Dattner is not one of the most widely known New York architects, he is surely one of the most prolific, especially as regards the many commissions he has received from the city. He cut his teeth as a young man back in the late '60s with his Adventure Playground in Central Park. This was somewhat revolutionary at the time, since it was the first playground conceived as a unified recreational zone; its sandboxes, wooden mazes, and jazzy structures went far beyond older playgrounds, neutral spaces equipped with a slide, some swings, and a jungle gym.
More recently, Mr. Dattner has designed P.S. 234 in TriBeCa, with its curving, sawtooth footprint, as well as its elegantly gridded and contextual metal gates. Much more historicist is the northern entrance to the transit hub at Broadway and 72nd Street, which tries to imitate the turn-of-the-century southern entrance, which in turn imitates the vernacular vocabulary of Old Amsterdam. There is an element of ungainly pastiche in that building that is very different in spirit from the Modernist probity of Mr. Dattner's latest effort in the Bronx.
Such willingness to adapt will not win Mr. Dattner the abiding respect of architectural purists, but at least it bears out the not dishonorable ideals articulated in his 1995 book, "Civil Architecture: The New Public Infrastructure": "Those who design civil architecture labor at the intersection of their culture's aspirations, political struggles and available resources. The realization of civil architecture requires civility, compromise, improvisation, accommodation, patience, tenacity and a sense of humor."
At the new public library in the Bronx, these ideals have been admirably brought to fruition.

[Derek2k3]

I passed by there two nights ago, it really stands out.

[Kris]

Into this context, the new library has alighted like a flying saucer in a cornfield. Designed by Richard Dattner, it is clearly the most glamorous thing to happen to the neighborhood in years. I would guess there is nothing like it within a three-mile radius.
Not a very knowledgeable critic: http://www.rvapc.com/ht/HTProject.aspx?Base=Projects&projID=227

[lofter1]

I love a good "GOTCHA!" ;)

[Edward]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/nyregion/16library.html?

January 16, 2006
New Bronx Library Meets Old Need
By GLENN COLLINS

The building may now be wireless and digitally zippered. But immigrants will be knocking at the door, just as they have for eight decades.

When it opens to the public tomorrow, the $50 million new Bronx Library Center at 310 East Kingsbridge Road will be a library on steroids. It will triple the size, and double the collection, of the old Fordham Library Center. That was the borough's former flagship, beloved through the generations from its opening in 1923 to its closing on Nov. 27.

Now there will be 127 desktop computers with Internet access, and patrons will be able to check out 30 laptops to use wirelessly within the building on any of its five floors. Programmable flat-screen displays and digital "zipper" signs will cue patrons to activities and events.

But Susan Kent, director of the New York Public Library's branch libraries, said the new library would still "be a gateway to a new generation of immigrants." "This library," she said, "has always played a role in the acculturation of newcomers."

These days, the nationalities have changed. While the percentage of foreign-born residents in the borough is comparable to what it was around the time the Fordham Library opened (36.4 percent in 1920; 29.3 percent in 2000), many arrive from the Caribbean or Latin America, not from over the Atlantic, according to an analysis of Census data by Susan Weber-Stoger, a researcher at Queens College.

In 1920 foreign-born residents came primarily from Russia, Italy, Austria, Germany, Ireland and Hungary. In 2000 they came primarily from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Mexico, Ecuador, Guyana and Honduras. The principal mother tongue was Yiddish among foreign-born residents older than 10 in 1920; in 2000 it was Spanish.

The new library will also have to accommodate many other users; the population of the Bronx nearly doubled from 1920 to 2000, from 744,302 to 1,335,474.

The old library used to be print-based; "now there are many media," Ms. Kent said. "And although visitors will be entering a building with walls, like the old library, the new one will be a building without walls, with access to the world, thanks to technology and the Internet."

The worn Fordham library, at 2556 Bainbridge Avenue, is but 120 paces on Poe Alley down the hill from the new building, and its powerful influence is still a presence in many lives.

"I saw the Oxford English Dictionary there for the first time," said Harold Bloom, 75, the influential literary scholar and Sterling professor of the humanities at Yale.

That was in the 1940's, when he lived at 170th Street and the Grand Concourse, and frequently made "the hefty walk," Dr. Bloom said, to the Fordham library. "I was always a little awed to be there."

His immigrant parents spoke only Yiddish.

"I remember being so touched by the enormous availability of large and complex dictionaries and concordances. I remember ransacking them," he said - speaking figuratively, of course.

The comedian Robert Klein, who grew up on Decatur Avenue near Gun Hill Road in the 1940's and 1950's, wrote about the Fordham library in his memoir, "The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue" (Simon & Schuster, 2005). The library, he said, "gave me the habit of reading and the stimulation of the imagination."

He added: "Who owned a book? The very idea was almost absurd in our family, where we had to make a buck go a long way." Even when Mr. Klein moved to Manhattan in his early 20's, "I still kept going up to the Fordham library to borrow from their wonderful selection of baroque music."

Ms. Kent, who also was born in the Bronx, said simply that "this building changed my life," adding, "I became a librarian." She remembered as a child coming to the library every week and walking up its chipped stair treads. "The librarians would put books aside for me," she said.

Memories of the library are still vivid for Eileen Maxwell, 72, who grew up on Creston Avenue near East 183d Street and now lives in Jenkintown, Pa. "I went to the Fordham Library at least every week, and took out a batch of books."

She became the first in her family to go to college, earned a doctorate at Fordham University a few blocks away, became an organizational psychologist, and married a clinical psychologist she met at Fordham. "The library," she said, "opened my eyes to a new world."

Despite its obsolescence, the old building was opening eyes right up to the end, before the shuttering on Thanksgiving weekend. Joe Hernandez, 16, an 11th grader at Walton High School, had found a table in the corner of the basement reference room to study for a chemistry test with a 16-year-old classmate, Vanessa Barrientos.

"It's a good place to study because it's quiet," said Mr. Hernandez, who hopes to be an engineer someday.

Nearby, Anthony Pagan, a 26-year-old National Guardsman recently returned from Hurricane Katrina duty, was on one of the 42 personal computers.

"This old building, I love it here," he said. "It's a great idea to have a new building," he added, "but I hope they'll offer the same services."

Not to worry. The new library, which will be open seven days a week, will have 200,000 books, periodicals and other media compared with 125,000 in the old one.

The building also will house a Latin and Puerto Rican Cultural Collection with 20,000 volumes and a two-classroom technology training center.

The library will also serve as a student and small-business advisory center, a literacy training hub, a meeting place, a performance space and a central library institution for the borough, said Daniel Heuberger, a principal with Dattner Architects, the lead designer of the building.

The 78,000-square-foot building's distinctive, upward-trending aluminum-clad cap has been likened to the Nike swoosh, but its function is to add more library space to offset restrictions caused by height and setback requirements of the building's trapezoidal real-estate parcel, once the site of a parking lot and a Con Edison administrative building.

"It is the symbolic visual point of the library," Mr. Heuberger said, "and we hope it will become an icon for the new Bronx."

It is a "green" building, deploying energy-efficient sun-reflecting exterior surfaces of glass and steel, photo sensors to lower interior lighting in bright sun and motion sensors to turn off unneeded lights. Its insulated glass curtain wall uses natural light to help heat the building, and reveals a Bronx panorama: the New York Botanical Garden, the spires of Fordham University, the towers of the Whitestone Bridge, and even the Empire State Building on clear days.

"We hope the wide windows and the striking views symbolize the opening to the community that we're all about," said Michael Alvarez, chief of the new and old libraries.

Given the Barnes & Noble model, the library will have plenty of comfortable chairs, mostly near the building's glass curtain wall. The central concourse-level reception area can be used as a gallery and is connected to a 150-seat auditorium with projection booth and theatrical-production facilities.

The second-floor areas for children offer an enclosed toddler space and a story-hour room with a puppet theater.

The third floor, with its adult circulating collections, also has its own ornament: a south-facing, sunlit terrace that can be an outdoor reading room and exterior event space.

It's a far cry from the quaint brick, three-story, 25,500-square-foot Fordham Road Library, with its fanlight windows and 20-foot ceilings, and its patchwork floors of institutional green linoleum.

Mr. Alvarez said the old library had 321,436 visitors in 2005, and he hopes for at least three times that - a million patrons - over the next year.

Although there are those who say that in the age of the Internet, libraries are obsolete, "people are using our libraries more than ever," Ms. Kent said.

The number of those who checked out books, periodicals and other New York Public Library materials for the fiscal year ending June 30 was 15,546,553 - an increase of 6 percent over the previous year. The 34 branches in the Bronx had three million visitors last year, of which 700,000 were cardholders.

"The Bronx has a population of 1.5 million," said Robert Bellinger, associate director of Bronx library branches, "and we won't rest until everyone has our card."

Residents can sign up for one on Saturday and Sunday when the new library will have a two-day festival celebrating the opening with readings, tours and entertainment.

And what of the old Fordham library? Dr. Kent said that it is likely to be transformed into a specialized high school by the city's Department of Education, adding: "It will continue to serve the Bronx."

[Kris]

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/01/15/nyregion/16library.large1.jpg
An exterior view of the Bronx Library Center.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/01/15/nyregion/16library.large2.jpg
The new fourth-floor reference area at the renovated Bronx Library Center.

[Fabrizio]

That´s beautiful!

[Kris]

New Bronx library has ambitious design

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
STAFF WRITER

January 19, 2006

http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2006-01/21500472.jpg

The Bronx's latest landmark sits on high ground, jammed between a psychic reader's storefront and a squat brick apartment block with fire escapes hanging off the facade. The Bronx Library Center, which opened Tuesday on East Kingsbridge Road in the Fordham section, is a gleaming glass box with a boomerang swoop to its roof, a startling sight in an area where public architecture tends toward the blocky and battened down. Using glass in midtown Manhattan is business as usual; using it here is a statement.

The Bronx is the borough of perpetual aspiration. A $50 million beacon of reading on a hill -- spacious, wired, well-lit and furnished with views -- can't help being what its architect, Daniel Heuberger, called "both a symbol and a leap of faith." The library would have seemed absurdly frail in the Bronx of 20 years ago. The hope now is that the borough is ready for a building that aims to be simultaneously transparent and secure.

Unlike the planned new Yankee Stadium, which will hide behind a movie-set facade, or Rafael Viñoly's Bronx Criminal Court from 2001, which cloaks the justice system in the appearance of transparency and beneficence, this building appeals directly to its neighbors' affections. Its success will depend on whether patrons will linger or just check their books out and leave.

Even as it functions as a refuge from the street, the library offers some literal, as well as literary, perspective on the world outside. Just outside the floor-to-ceiling windows is the garish yellow sign for Tuff City Tattoos. The fourth floor Puerto Rican and Latino Cultural Center offers a panorama of serried roofs.

Inside, every detail carries a load of optimism tempered with realism. Nothing is as cheap or basic as it could be, but nothing is indulgent, either. The floors are carpeted in durable squares that can be replaced one at a time. Patrons can slouch in upholstered reading chairs that have been coated with a stain-repelling substance called Krypton. Fluorescent light tubes have been recessed and shaded to soften their institutional chill. At one end of the third floor is an outdoor reading terrace, furnished with steel cafe tables and chairs. It's not easy to make a space this pretty and this tough.

Heuberger's Manhattan firm, Dattner Architects, has dotted the metropolitan area with civic projects: Riverbank State Park along the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Children's Adventure Center in the Bronx Botanical Garden, the Goodwill Games pool in East Meadow's Eisenhower Park -- all structures meant to take a lot of abuse without losing their twinkle.

For the library, Dattner was handed an awkward, wedge-shaped site on a steep incline and a daunting set of requirements. "Today, a library fulfills all sorts of functions that schools and social workers used to do," Heuberger said.

The architect had to carve out space for small business owners to find organizational advice, job seekers to get help with their resumes and the hearing-impaired to have a machine read them a magazine.

The swooshing roofline helps. It connects the fourth floor with an upper mezzanine illuminated by clerestory windows, so that the counseling area upstairs merges with the reading floor downstairs in one grand but quiet hall. The high ceiling, curved and laminated in blond wood, nods vaguely to the famously sumptuous Reading Room of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, but doesn't aim for its marmoreal solemnity. This is not a place that asks visitors to revere its architecture -- only to fall in love with books.

http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2006-01/21500474.jpg

http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2006-01/21500475.jpg

http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2006-01/21500476.jpg

Copyright © 2006, Newsday, Inc.

[Kris]

Issue 02_02.01.2006

Meet Mister Streetscape

http://www.archpaper.com/images/feature_02_06/bronxlib_01.jpg

With the new Bronx Public Library Center, Richard Dattner, master
of the background building, moves toward center stage, writes Thomas de Monchaux

http://www.archpaper.com/images/feature_02_06/bronxlib_02.jpg
Central Park Adventure Playground, 1967

You owe Richard Dattner. If you’re an architect and urbanist, or just a client and connoisseur, and have ever tried to describe a particular kind of public space that starts at the sidewalk and goes as far as your imagination will take it; and if you have ever used the word, “streetscape”to describe it: you owe him. That’s because Dattner, whose 40-year-old New York practice has been concerned largely with the public and civic, copyrighted the term in the 1970s. It was part of a patent he took out on a line of street furniture, which included a prefabricated fiberglass booth whose hemispherical lozenge geometry still adds a certain miniature modernist grandeur to the work of taxi-dispatchers, cops, and others throughout the city. Once you recognize this booth, you see it everywhere, from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to JFK Airport. But it is also so ubiquitous that it has become almost invisible—just another part of, well, the streetscape. Dattner is philosophical about the fate of the word, concluding, “Well, you can’t really own something like that.” The term may belong to him, but Dattner will be the first to tell you that the landscape of the street belongs to everybody. Especially in New York.

http://www.archpaper.com/images/feature_02_06/bronxlib_03.jpg
P.S. 380, Williamsburg, 1981

It is the fate of much of Dattner’s New York work to integrate itself seamlessly into the streetscape and cityscape. His portfolio includes unconventional playgrounds on the West side of Central Park; vast infrastructural complexes like Brooklyn’s 26th Ward Sludge Treatment Facility and Manhattan’s East 16th Street Con Edison Service Building; the park atop Upper Manhattan’s giant North River Pollution Treatment Plant; and public schools like TriBeCa’s P.S. 234. A project now on the boards, a grass-roofed Queens Borough Library Branch in Long Island City, is designed to be literally unseen from adjacent residential towers, despite a strong presence at ground level. His is an indispensable body of work, but in the absence of a signature style, it is also an invisible one.

http://www.archpaper.com/images/feature_02_06/bronxlib_04.jpg
Modular Ticket Booths, 1974

His approach did not develop this way through a lack of exposure: Dattner has enountered icon-making architects in his time, both as a student and as a teacher. After study at MIT, he had a stint as a student at London’s Architectural Association in the late 1950s where he learned, “how to do more with less” from John Stirling and Alison and Peter Smithson. Some twenty years later, he conducted a second-year design studio at Cooper Union and had a “very independent-minded and energetic” student called Daniel Libeskind. But in his own work, he has taken what he calls an “existential approach” to questions of form, style, and material. “Look at Renzo Piano,” Dattner says. “Each project is crafted and sensitive to its circumstances. Polynesia is different from the New York Times. Within our office we aspire to that level of thought.”

http://www.archpaper.com/images/feature_02_06/bronxlib_05.jpg
P.S. 234, Tribeca, 1988

Critical assessment of the results has been varied, generally colored by the low expectations that, especially in New York, greet the public commissions that have made up the bulk of Dattner’s work. For instance, Architectural Record found his 1983 Bronx Con Edison Customer Service Facility to be a “sturdy,” response to the client’s stated need for a “simple, functional design avoiding any impression of wasteful expenditure.” That magazine pronounced his 1989 project, P.S. 234, a success, “considering the city’s web of bureaucracy and the limited means available. n another city it might qualify as just one more well designed building, but in New York City [it] stands out.” Dattner’s 1993 sports facilities at the North River Pollution plant were found to be “handsome and colorful,” by Jane Holtz Kay, architecture critic for The Nation, but the overall effect was “sparse” and “perfunctory”: “Even with budget constraints,” asked Kay, “why such lack of zest?” Former New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger was unimpressed by the 1972 Riverside Park Community Apartments in upper Manhattan, on which Dattner worked, in collaboration with the firms of Henri A. Legendre and Max Wechsler. “The project looks dreadful from Riverside Drive,” Goldberger wrote in The City Observed, “where the contrast between its huge size and that of everything around it is…disturbing.” He found the architecture itself, “banal.”

http://www.archpaper.com/images/feature_02_06/bronxlib_06.jpg
[I]Coney Island Comfort Station and Public Restroom, 2004

Dattner suggests that the different circumstances of different projects suggest different details and designs, even commonplace ones: “You make the rules out of the specific site and out of the specific problem; some projects call for a background building.” But his latest project, The New York Public Library’s Bronx Public Library Center, which opened on January 17th, moves his work from background to foreground. “This project has to be seen,” Dattner says, almost conceding the point. “It’s at the heart of a community, it’s on one of the highest points in the borough.” Capped by a dramatic butterfly roof over a penthouse research room, the $50 million, 78,000-square-foot building features stacks and high-tech reading rooms on five floors, along with a 150-seat auditorium, classrooms and meeting areas in a basement level. These, along with a 20,000-volume Latino Cultural Collection and programs for literacy and job training, will serve as a community center for the predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood. The below-grade facilities are accessed through a slot of space daylit by a street-level strip of windows, and further illuminated by artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s installation depicting a DNA sequence. That slot of space is positioned below a set of generous cantilevers that project the library’s reading rooms out past the primary structural elements of the building, back into the streetscape itself.

http://www.archpaper.com/images/feature_02_06/bronxlib_07.jpg
The glass-enclosed atrium stair

The library’s upper levels are accessed by a rear staircase whose central atrium is enclosed in channel glass. The effect is poetic and pragmatic. According to Dattner, “As you step up into knowledge, you step into light.” The glass enclosure also “stops a kid from throwing a book downstairs. Or,” he adds drily, “a companion.” Elsewhere, a circular half-wall produces a children’s reading area in which children feel enclosed but are visible to adults—a gesture that recalls the landforms Dattner designed for Adventure Playgrounds in the 1960s.

http://www.archpaper.com/images/feature_02_06/bronxlib_08.jpg
The main reading room is located on the top floor

Unusually for a library, the building features outdoor terraces where Dattner, who, though Polish-born, spent his early childhood in Cuba, imagines, “readings, moon-viewing, and piñata parties.” Dattner collaborator and project architect Daniel Heuberger describes the building, with its clear front façade and crisp details as, “instantly readable and transparent, with no complicated wayfinding.” A rear interior wall, pale blue on every level, metaphorically mirrors the glass façade and subtly distinguishes between private and public spaces. Dattner contrasts this glassy openness with the first library he designed in New York City, the Parkchester Branch Library, also in the Bronx, in 1982: “At the time they had this list of things you couldn’t do, like no windows along the street wall without bars or screens.” The visual openess of the Bronx Library, Dattner says, “is a testament to increased civility in New York City.”

http://www.archpaper.com/images/feature_02_06/bronxlib_09.jpg
On the ground level, an Installation by Iñigo Manglano-ovalle despicts
a DNA sequence.

Civility is a touchstone of how Dattner describes his work, which includes not only public commissions but what he describes as “the unseen public city” of urban infrastructure. He suggested the term Civil Architecture in his 1995 book of that title, writing, “Civic Architecture [was close] to my intended theme but missed meanings resonating around ‘civil’—civility, civilization, civil engineering.”

The Bronx Public Library Center is the latest in a long series of public commissions that began with Brooklyn’s P.S. 380 in South Williamsburg, a Stirlingesque 1969 school featuring an innovative play area that recalls Dattner’s contemporary 67th Street Adventure Playground in Central Park. The playground, which was commissioned when the city was newly ambitious about design during the administration of Mayor John Lindsay, was donated by Estée and Joseph Lauder. The Lauders were also the clients for Dattner’s first substantial project: in 1964, along with Samuel Brody, he designed Estée Lauder’s 350,000 square-foot laboratory complex in Melville, New York. Dattner and Brody developed a low-cost façade system of curved and flat porcelain-coated steel panels set into neoprene gasket frames. At the time, Dattner was teaching at Cooper Union alongside Richard Meier. “One day,” says Dattner, “we got a call from Richard, saying, ‘How did you do that with those panels?’ Well, you know the rest of that story.” But he is magnanimous about what became a signature motif of his contemporary: “Meier is a great architect.”

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Richard Dattner and Samuel Brody collaborated on the Estée Lauder Laboratory Complex in Melville, New York, which was completed in 1964.

Dattner goes on to recall his time in London suring the 1950s : “It was just a few years after the war. There were still a lot of rubble.” The way that London kids reclaimed ruined sites as places for play, games, and sports inspired Britain’s Adventure Playground Movement, which advocated lively but rough-edged and even perilous landscapes that required imagination and ambition from their inhabitants. Dattner remembers consulting with movement founder Lady Allen of Hurtwood, who told him, “Better a broken bone than a broken spirit.” That postwar urban streetscape also engendered the playfully no-nonsense work of the Smithsons, whom Dattner remembers as, “tough, tough, tough, but so hospitable.” That’s a combination of qualities perhaps familiar to the New Yorker in Dattner, who has designed many of the civic bones of the city and remains a keen observer of its spirit. Asked about his 1987 Louis Armstrong Cultural Center in Queens, a Smithsonesque utilitarian container for sports and community activities, the first thing he says isn’t about the architecture: “Well,” he begins, “it’s where they play the best basketball in the city.”

Thomas de Monchaux is a writer and architect in New York City.

Bronx Public Library Center

Architect: Dattner Architects; Richard Dattner, principal; Daniel Heuberger, project architect;
Robin Auchincloss, William Stein, George Cumell, Joon Chom, project team
Structural Engineer: Severud Associates Geotechnical/Civil Engineer: Langan Engineering Mechanical/Electrical Engineer: Robert Derector Associates Landscape Designer: MKW & Associates Lighting Consultant: Domingo Gonzalez Design Construction Manager: F. J. Sciame Construction

Copyright © 2005 The Architect's Newspaper, LLC