CarmenPeñaloza

//** The Salt Lake City Main Library **// Library and Civic Plaza Competition



As we all know, to organize the space of a city or a building, is not an easy work. Professionals should consider a lot of elements and always thinking in the users. So it seems that both architects and urban planners have a serious challenge to deal with. Here I am going to talk about the use of space at The Salt Lake City Main Library in order to Horizontal and Vertical Circulation.

The Salt Lake Public Library Building and Civic Plaza, one of three finalist submissions in a national design competition, is definitely an iconic public structure that offers four accessible facades, plus the roof, each responding to context, views, program disposition, and future development.

This structure consist in a main entrance to the library, an atrium with balconies ( that establishes both the public vertical circulation and primary orientation space in the building), also has a ground floor, where is the information Desk; then it comes the lower level which contains the auditorium (operations and maintenance spaces), the second floor houses the Children´s Library, On the third floor are the newspapers and magazines, the fourth floor is equipped with the fiction collection, the non-fiction A collection, as well as the Administration Offices and Boardroom; now the fifth floor houses Local History, Special Collections, The Center for the Book and the Art Gallery; and finally, the penthouse/roof level houses the central staff facilities all with access to a private landscaped roof terrace. The remainder of the roof is a public terrace and roof garden.



I consider that this building expire with the different requirements of a structure to be well-defined in aspects of architecture or urbanity too, like Horizontal and Vertical Circulation!. Horizontal, because it is really adequate inside, it expresses very well the directness, the points of converging traffic are well done, making you comfortable to walk into this place, and finally the changing in level are well expressed. Vertical because it has excellent path so that one can approach the look and the three-dimensional vision of the structure, also inside the building like corridors galleries, between others. All is about taking advance of space and I think that The Salt Lake Public Library Building and Civic Plaza did it very well.

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