ANOTHER LIBRARY TREASURE HERE IN PASADENA

Some of you may be aware that I have been involved with the Pasadena Central Library project. Several other AIA PF chapter members have joined me.

But this is not that library! In fact it is one that I am deeply ashamed to say I probably have driven past and glanced at it at least 100 times. Yet I never stopped by or walked in. I finally did a week or so ago and was in for an amazing treat:

It is one of our own James Pulliam FAIA’s masterpieces. Jim passed away at 80 on December 27, 2005. So he didn’t last long enough to have been recognized by the Joseph F. Thomas Founder’s Award. Yet his legacy lives on through his amazing work. Lamanda Park Branch Library, pictured below, is a prime example:

Set back within a small park behind wide lawns and trees, it is highly visible from Altadena Drive via its wide entry walk. Its style would probably be classified as ‘brutalism' because of its board formed natural concrete frame. But its symmetry reminds one of the works of Mies van der Rohe, Craig Elwood and others of the steel genre that preceded it. The concrete frame is detached from the building walls and provides a pleasant deeply shaded walkway around its perimeter.

 

Walking inside is a totally opposite experience! The interior, also completely symmetrical, is illuminated by a band of natural light all around the perimeter that washes the ceilings and evens out the artificial lighting. The ceiling hovers over the perimeter walls with no visible mullions in the butt-jointed glass band that runs uninterrupted nearly all the way around the building.

The exterior walls are patterned-concrete block. They stop a foot short of the ceiling and are completely disconnected from the concrete frames or any other visible means of support. Below the glass band are full height windows set within a wide concrete frame, again natural concrete. There the block walls utilize returns for added stability and better light dispersion. It is also a clever way to create pockets for the book stacks. I am assuming that the walls are cantilevered up out of the foundation and floor slabs.

Our firm had done a major retrofit to a college library in the San Diego area that was built during the same 1968 era. It used a similar concrete frame design with vertical and horizontal bands of glass encompassing the perimeter masonry walls – detaching them from the concrete frames and relying solely on the foundations and floor slab for support. DSA no longer accepted that and required a retrofit, as were eventually all the other buildings on campus with the same feature.

But going back to Pulliam’s library, the effect of that unbroken band of glass is both ambiguous and compelling. It is something I had never seen before and, along with its authenticity of use of materials, one of the building’s signature statements.

The Lamanda Park Library is certainly a design of its time. Yet it could be said that it achieves that illusive quality that few buildings ever achieve - no matter how compelling they were at the time they were designed: --- timelessness!

Jim