Springdale Library & Komagata Maru Park

This article appeared in the April 2020 issue of ARCHITECT.

“Palaces for the people.” That’s the phrase that Andrew Carnegie used to describe the public libraries that he helped establish in the United States and Canada, and the idea is more relevant than ever. Today’s libraries are places to study and read, but also to make things, connect with social services, and hang out with neighbors.

The new Springdale branch of the Brampton Public Library fills those roles in a diverse suburban city near Toronto. And the library’s new building, designed by Toronto-based firm RDH Architects, hits another goal: “We work to introduce serious architecture into public libraries,” says RDH design director Tyler Sharp, Intl. Assoc. AIA. “The aim is to give a level of detail, finish, and resolution that is in keeping with museums and other civic buildings.”

To create palaces, in other words, in a modern design language. At the 26,000-square-foot Springdale branch, this means an exercise in rigorously detailed glass and steel. The building’s outer façades are 70% glazed, and treated with vertically striped ceramic frits that were arranged using parametric design to manage solar and heat gain. (The building is aiming for LEED Gold.) The frits’ vertical lines rhyme visually with narrow steel exterior columns, which support a thin roof plane of lightly polished stainless steel.

All this stands out visually on what Sharp accurately calls “a very typical North American suburban site.” The library is surrounded by new, quasi-Victorian row houses, an arterial road, and a strip mall. But branch manager Lexi Black says patrons have welcomed the contemporary design: “The feedback on the building has been almost entirely positive,” she says.

But the architecture also has to work hard: Springdale’s local area has more than 100,000 people, about half of them immigrants, predominantly from South Asia. There are many multigenerational households, and the community “takes learning extremely seriously,” Black says. This means that story time is always packed; and so are the study spaces, with college students during the day joined by high schoolers in the evening. The librarians’ cylindrical service desk sits at the center of the floor plate, where they can offer advice to a student, or a new immigrant, or a job seeker.

Inside, the material language is more hospitable but still restrained. The floors are predominantly a gray polished concrete, the few walls are back-painted glass, and the ceiling is a white-painted textured drywall, which absorbs sound and conceals almost all the mechanicals.

The triangular plan is divided into three wings: a children’s area, a study space, and a community room, and glazed partitions allow near-total visual connection between them. “We’re using transparency in order to encourage people to come into the building, but also allow them to understand the architecture in a clear way,” Sharp says.

Yet in section, the interior is full of surprises; both the floor and what Sharp calls the “roofscape” rise and fall. At the middle of the plan, the ceiling rises upward to an oculus that measures 13 feet across and is expressed on the exterior as a large mound wrapped in a green roof. There’s another oculus in the children’s area, where a thin-edged oval of drywall extrudes down from the ceiling, creating a half-enclosed area between the sky and the green-carpeted floor. “There’s an organic, fluid geometry,” Sharp says, “We’re thinking of the building as a landscape.”

The site itself, once farmland, was basically featureless. The architects changed that, designing a park that surrounds the library building in collaboration with Toronto landscape architects NAK Design Strategies. A set of linear paths and reflecting pools buffer the library from the road to the southwest. To the northwest, a play area is organized around text: Elements of the plan and sculptural letters spell out the word “imagine”—fitting for a project that spurs exactly that in its visitors.

Project Credits
Project: Springdale Library & Komagata Maru Park, Brampton, Ontario, Canada
Client: City of Brampton
Architect/Interior Designer: RDH Architects, Toronto . Tyler Sharp, Intl. Assoc. AIA (design principal); Bob Goyeche (managing principal); Sanjoy Pal (project manager); Shelley Vanderwal, Carlos Tavares, Juan Caballero, Soo-Jin Rim, Gladys Cheung, Lisa Sato, Simon Routh, Anton Freundorfer (project team)
Structural Engineer: WSP Canada
ME Engineer/LEED Consultant: Jain Consultants
Civil Engineer: Valdor Engineering
Landscape Architect: NAK Design Strategies
Water Features Consultant: The Resicom Group
Specifications: DGS Consulting Services
Size: 2,418 square meters (26,000 square feet)
Cost: $16.67 million, Canadian ($11.52 million)