Civic Reading Rooms
A public library planned as five rooms of different acoustic character, from fully silent to openly social.
Civic Reading Rooms — gallery
Arild Vågen · CC BY-SA 4.0
Project information
- City centre
- 2023
- 1,760 m²
- Completed
- Municipal authority
- Architecture, Interiors, Furniture
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Description
The project
Libraries are usually planned as one large room with rules about noise. This one is planned as five rooms with different acoustic conditions, and no rules at all.
The quietest room is at the top, small, top-lit, and lined in cork. The most social is at street level, opens directly onto the pavement, and is finished in hard plaster and terrazzo so it sounds like a public building.
Between them the character shifts gradually. Visitors sort themselves by how much noise they want to be near, which turns out to work better than signage.
Uniqueness
What makes it particular
Acoustic performance is used as a planning tool rather than a technical afterthought. The specification of each room's reverberation time came before its dimensions were fixed.
Our concept
Where it started
A gradient, not a hierarchy. Nobody is sent to the quiet room; they arrive at it by walking up through progressively quieter conditions.
Rough work
Drawings, studies and site
The working documents behind the finished building — including the parts that changed.
01Site plan showing the closed perimeter
02Concrete formwork mock-up on site
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