Precedent Study2019_4wks
Hunters Point Community Library
Steven Holl Architects_2019_Queens, NY
The Hunters Point Community Library located in Queens, New York is the product of Steven Holl Architects and was completed in 2019. The architecture interjects itself among a forest of rapidly built tall and unconsidered condominium buildings. The large sculptured cutouts that dominate the façade work to give prominence to the relatively small building among the tall towers that produce its backdrop. Each of the sculpted openings is filled by a rigid mullion grid intensifying the reading of the non-orthogonal apertures and locating the building's scale among its neighbors. The façade cutouts require special study, each is composed of trajectories derived from circulation elements, floor plates intersections and sometimes arbitrary tangents. These cutouts are at a separate scale from the interior space and each services more than one floor plate or program zone. The largest aperture on the Manhattan façade links many spaces and program types together. Each of the programmatic elements occupies its own mezzanine, yet most of the programs have auditory and sometimes visual access to one another. The architecture generates an environment of connection between programs, reinforced by the circulation that snakes between mezzanines, and the apertures that inscribe them.
