Project Management, Sustainability and Whole Lifecycle Thinking

Project Management, Sustainability and Whole Lifecycle Thinking

Architectural Analysis of Famous Building

With the completion of construction on the Civic Center in 1996, the San Francisco Main Public Library's ambitious design project transformed its previously staid building into an architectural representation of the city itself. By fusing a modern sense of sustainable building with his own take on the traditional Beaux-Arts style, lead designer James Ingo Freed, of the renowned firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, along with associate designer Cathy Simon of the firm Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris, managed to erect a fitting contribution to one of America's most historic yet progressive metropolitan centers. The New Main Library was designed on a fittingly massive scale, with its 375,000 square feet providing twice the amount of usable space as the previous library building. The building's expansive scale was also intended to assure proportionality with the library's monumental neighbors throughout the Civic Center.

The fundamental duality found in the surrounding urban environment of the Civic Center, a classical Beaux-Arts complex of massive, monumental structures built to evoke old world European capitals, was a significant influence on the late Freed's design concept, as demonstrated by his innovate approach to the building's facade. Freed paid homage to the dominance of Beaux-Arts influence on the Civic Center by adorning the west and north sides of the New Main Library, which face City Hall and the adjacent ceremonial boulevard, in classical facade constructed of Sierra White granite obtained from the same quarry used to provide its prominent neighbors with stone and building materials (San Francisco Public Library, 2013). As respected architectural reporter commentator Herbert Muschamp, of The New York Times, observed in his original review of the New Main Library, "walls of silvery-gray granite are set with pilasters and rows of windows with Roman grilles (and) there is a row of stylized palmettes at the roof line" (1996), with these classical touches respecting the century-old design of the Civic Center's most historic buildings. To complete the binary design, Freed and Simon elected to cloak the east and west sides of the New Main Library, which face away from the Civic Center and out into the city's thriving commercial district, in a decidedly modern design. Signifying the city's rapid transition from a mining boomtown to a modern metropolis, Freed wrapped the classical Beaux-Arts inspired cornice around the south side of the building, before suddenly revealing a modern facade of strikingly austere steel windows and stone walls.