BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY - UPHAM'S CORNER BRANCH
48-305 Praxis Studio II
Professor Jeremy Ficca
Section Instructor Jeff King
Spring 2024
This design for a community branch library in Upham’s Corner proposes a space for the BPL that will act as a living room for the community of Dorchester. Responding to both the unique site context as well as the the changing role of the library in today's times through its massing, program, and materials, the library transforms the former industrial lot into a new public space that is a civic and cultural node for the neighborhood.
Divided into three zones, a study space facing the main street overhangs a public sidewalk space acting as a front porch for the building. On the eastern side of the site, reading spaces face a quiet historical cemetery, while services are placed in the center of the building as a core that connects the community and library side of the building.
The library is specifically designed with all ages in mind, allowing the library to serve the broadest demographic possible. Spaces such as music practice rooms, media labs, and fabrication shops provide families with programs and resources for children and teens to develop interests and hobbies and their cultural, artistic, and technical knowledge. Co-working and study spaces allow students and adults to work, and sunlit mezzanines provide seniors a calm space to read.
The openings are intentionally aligned with the of structure on the street side so the cables suspending the floor plates are seen and experienced from outside and inside. In response to the local architecture of the site context, the building is clad in a cedar wood siding inspired by the language of formed by the windows and shutters of the residential buildings of the context, drawing on different materials and building traditions local to the typology of the region.
Using mass timber as a structural system, the structure of the building hybridizes timber with steel to push the properties of glulam and cross laminated timber to explore forms such as double cantilevers and suspended slabs.
Process
