SALT LAKE CITY PUBLIC LIBRARY, USA

The Salt Lake City Public Library system's main branch building is an architecturally unique structure in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is located at 210 East, 400 South, across from the Salt Lake City and County Building and Washington Square. This present modern library, was built after celebrating the library's 100th anniversary in early 1998. An $84 million library bond was approved to move the library north half a block to its current location. The firm Moshe Safdie and Associates and local architects in VCBO Architecture designed the building, which opened to the public on February 8, 2003. The former library building is now The Leonardo museum.

The Salt Lake City main library has an area of 22,000 square metres and is a five-story tall, wedge-shaped building. The library has a collection of over 500,000 books as well as subscriptions to over 60 newspapers and magazines and 163 internet capable computers. The structure includes 34,370 cubic metres of concrete as well as 16,385 square metres of glass. One of its features is the five-story curved glass wall.

Outside the library is Library Square, a landscaped and paved plaza. There are several shops on the square as well as the studios of radio station KCPW-FM. Library Square is paved with limestone from Israel. Upon entering the five story building, one enters the "Urban Room", which has the same limestone paving as the square. The room extends for all five floors and ends with a skylight of 1,900 square metres. More shops line one side of the Urban Room. A rooftop garden completes the structure. It is planted with trees, grasses, flowering bulbs and various perennial plants. The whole library depends on natural lighting, reducing the need of lights in the library. A huge five story glass wall is where most of the light comes from. It is a magnificent building and I would gladly visit Salt Lake City again just to make a return visit to this library!

This post is part of the Mellow Yellow Monday meme.

From architect's sketch...

To architect's model...

To the actual building