Green Square Library and Plaza

Speaking Volumes

Zetland, NSW
City of Sydney
Public
2018
$65M

This public library and plaza in Sydney speak volumes on an attitude to public space, demonstrating that buildings aren’t always the answer. Won in competition as a ‘critically urban’ response, the design is a commentary on what the broader masterplan for the neighbourhood lacked: a generous, celebratory place that invites the community in.

During its creation, Green Square was Australia’s largest urban renewal project, transforming an industrial inner-city precinct of Sydney into a new town centre with housing for 61,000 people and jobs for 21,000. Questions about how to make this freshly master planned district into a sustainable, liveable community were central to the brief for the public library. How could the new neighbourhood be given heart and soul? How could people be brought together when public space is at a premium? And what is the future of the library?

The solution places the library below ground, preserving the precious public space on top as a focal point for the new town centre. A selection of elements pop up into the plaza as geometric shapes, blurring the boundaries between indoors and out, and able to operate independently outside opening hours. A wedge-shaped, glazed pavilion provides the main entrance, leading down into the library itself, which is arranged around a lushly planted, circular sunken garden cut through the ground plane. A beacon-like, six-storey tower emerges above, with a stack of reading rooms, music and computer labs below a colourfully lit plant room. A trapezoid auditorium was added, scooping down from upper to lower levels, for readings, performance and conversation.

This is a building detailed for the individual as well as the city. As well as reclaiming outdoor space for the neighbourhood as a whole, it offers human-scaled places for unexpected uses and private moments. The wide steps leading up to the plaza are simultaneously sun loungers or bleacher seating; the coloured niches in the childrens’ library portholes, reading nests or hamster wheels. The competition conditions were liberating creatively, the challenges of the site warranting experimentation and prompting the kind of generous, connected city making that welcomes inhabitation and participation.

2020
Best Public Building, Property Council Of Australia, Innovation & Excellence Awards

2019
Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture, National Architecture Awards
National Award for Urban Design, National Architecture Awards
‘Learning Space’ Award, INDE Awards
NSW Premier’s Prize, AIA NSW
John Verge Award for Interior Architecture, AIA NSW
Urban Design Award, AIA NSW
Public Architecture Award, AIA NSW
Chicago Athenaeum International Design Award
NSW ‘Civic Landscape’ Award, AILA NSW
Finalist Architizer Awards
Finalist World Architecture Festival

2018
International Library Award, Architecture Review (UK)

Designed by Studio Hollenstein in association with Stewart Architecture; with HASSELL, ARUP and Collider.

Tom Roe

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