Details
27/0/10009 ST IVES ROAD
11-JUN-03 MAIDENHEAD LIBRARY, AND SURROUNDING RA
ISED PAVEMENT, RAMPS, STEPS AND FOUNTAIN
II
Public Library. Designed 1967-8, built 1970-3. Ahrends Burton and Koralek, architects; partner in charge Paul Koralek, job architect Gareth Wright; engineers Felix Samuely and Partners.
Reinforced concrete frame with suspended floor slabs on piled foundations. Clear span space frame roof, of welded joints using ms circular hollow tubes, maximum diameter of three inches. This roof, of 80ft clear span and 112' 6" overall width, is supported on eight cruciform reinforced concrete columns set outside the building. Cladding and garden walls in engineering brick and with brick paviours of the same colour to plinth, entrance ramp and fountain in garden area.
The library is built on a sloping site that is lower at the rear than to the street. Near-square plan on three levels, with projecting corner for children's storytelling and offices. Lower ground floor stacks and offices. Slightly raised ground floor has the lending, music and children's libraries, together with exhibition space and librarian's office. A central well has stairs on either side that lead to the first floor reference library, and meeting room. Same hard surfaces internally, with brick staircases and balustrading to first floor.
Ramp leads from the street to entrance at the side, and steps rise from a footpath to the rear. Chamfered plinth incorporating slits for bicycle parking. Large bay window elements, their tops splayed at the same angle as the space overhang above, provide reading bays internally. Painted steel windows with sliding opening lights in black anodised aluminium, Beta louvres at high level. A fountain was built on the site of the old library.
In 1959 the Roberts Report recommended that towns with populations of under 40,000 should lose their status as independent library authorities. Redcar and Maidenhead, both smaller but targeted for regional expansion and growing fast, objected. Eventually, both secured funding for new buildings, whose briefs were developed with the Department of Education and Science as an initiative to make libraries more welcoming to the user. The idea for a new library at Maidenhead dates from January 1963, and the new library, holding 75,000 volumes, was built alongside the old, which was then demolished and a garden made on the site, with raised walls, built-in seats and a fountain. The building is striking and novel in its use of a space frame to create a clear, column-free interior and to give clerestory lighting all round the building, while the hard red brick gives a semblance of weight to the lower structure, although it is not in fact load-bearing. 'The idea of a roof implies for me a balance of solid and void', Koralek told Powell, and its deep overhang was designed to be sheltering, inviting and uninstitutional. The meticulous use of brickwork, extending a plinth from the outside through the interior, is a distinctive feature of ABK's work at this time. It is also a response to the red brick of the Victorian town. ABK first came to prominence when in 1961, the year of their foundation, Paul Koralek won a competition for the Berkeley Library, Trinity College, Dublin. This much smaller building is a similar mix of flexible space around fixed staircases and balconies, and similarly makes use of toplighting to create a dramatic and well-lit interior. Additionally, however, it shows a progression in ABK's use of materials and a greater variety of forms in their 1970s' buildings than they had displayed in the 1960s.
'If.. the performance of a building in terms of benefit to the users is the only yardstick by which its success or failure can ultimately be determined - then Ahrends Burton and Koralek must have produced an outright winner' (Brick Bulletin).
Sources
Tubular Structures, 18 April 1971
Architectural Review, vol.155, no.927, May 1974, pp.256-63
Brick Bulletin, vol.10, no.6, September 1974, pp.4-6
Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, no.175, September/October 1974, pp.117-20
Peter F Smith, Architecture and the Human Dimension, London, George Godwin, 1979, p.37.
Ahrends Burton and Koralek, London, Academy Editions, 1991, pp.64-7.
Kenneth Powell, ed., Collaborations, The Architecture of ABK, London, August/Birkh?user, 2002, pp.67-70.
