The Winter Park Public Library is our Building of the Day.
What does the building tell us about the future?
Walkway between the Winter Park Public Library (right) and the Winter Park Events Center (left) looking towards Martin Luther King Jr. Park. The two structures are poised as if for movement. This is accentuated by the rose-colored precast forms pinned at the corners but rising in the middle, like something lighter than air. Photo Richard Reep
The Winter Park Public Library is our Building of the Day for today during Architecture Month. In an earlier post entitled "Clutter Sometimes Obscures Things," we argue that the Library is one of the strongest statements about the future we have locally, and it causes tension with the surrounding commercial clutter that needs to get gone. Here, we discuss aspects of the library that relate to the movement called Afrofuturism.
Afrofuturism is a movement of art, dance, music, literature and yes, architecture as well. No cultural movement is really complete, argue many cultural observers, until it is expressed in architecture. Afrofuturism uses African themes to express ideas about the African future, often using science fiction as a vehicle or a shortcut to hasten it. Architecture seems hopelessly mired in recreating boring ghosts from the past (think Mediterranean revival or colonial architecture on a new building), hopelessly tangled up in the technology of sustainability (solar panels and complicated water devices, buildings-as-janitors), and crushed under the docker of new urbanism. Afrofuturism offers a future that examines the unexamined continent of Africa for clues to express form and function in a way that feels familiar, yet is totally new. We'll see how this applies to the Winter Park Library.
Sir David Adjaye was the building's design architect, an architect from Tanzania and Pritzker Prize winner. He worked with local architects Hunton Brady to achieve the project. Perhaps the most important aspect of Afrofuturist architecture is its emphasis on the notion of architecture as community engagement. The core function of a modern library is still bookshelves, and the Library builds on this core with an events center, outdoor plaza and opportunities for film viewing, guided public discourse, receptions, celebrations, classes, and more informal gathering events, all offered in quiet abundance. The architecture enables community engagement by its program.
Afrofuturist architecture often suggests movement, borrowing from both natural and human creations to suggest dynamism. As a basic form in the landscape, the Winter Park Library elevates the notion of a library, or repository of knowledge, into a singular symmetrical shape that suggests high, if not the highest, importance. The shape itself, an inverted pyramid, opens out to the sky in a gesture that is universal in nature. The taut curved walls of the structure reinforce the notion of lifting up as the red slabs seem to strain at the four corners, raised in the center.
Precast panels with parabolic relief pattern, a sort of calligraphy that looks extremely simple but was likely fraught with a lot of technical challenges. It is executed beautifully. At left, Hausa architecture from Nigeria about 1960, with an elaborate relief pattern carved into the adobe. (top photo Richard Reep; left photo Susan Denyer, from African Traditional Architecture, p. 182).
Afrofuturism also tends to mix contemporary technology with traditional African ways of object-making. On these walls is embossed a very tight parabolic repeating pattern, which I find very African. It recalls the organic/ geometric carved adobe architectural calligraphy of the Hausa. The pattern and the shape splits the difference between contemporary scientific westernism and something older, more cosmic, perhaps more elemental. The angled walls accentuate the relief shadows in Florida's strong sunlight. Although rigorously geometric, the wall panels are each individually shaped.
Occupying the center of the Library is the stair opening, a black plate-steel construction. It is not something directly connectable to Afrofuturism, except as a celebration, perhaps, of ascent. The stair reinforces the effect of a ship landed, its entry ramp extended, an invitation.
Winter Park Public Library's smooth, glossy black stair set off against plum-colored drywall and rubbed architectural concrete background. One thing about the Winter Park Library to be thankful for is sparing use of drywall as an interior shape-giving material. Photo Richard Reep.
The second level of the library floats away from the exterior wall. This is probably one of the strongest references to Adjaye's earlier project, the National African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington, DC. Same exterior geometry and same disconnect between the floor and the walls. This intensifies the effect of being inside a grand space that manipulates Florida's strong sunlight into an interior architecture. The stair feels retractable somehow, as if it has touched down for just a moment.
While it has attracted controversy at home, this work by Sir David Adjaye was featured in Sarah Gamble's article about the building's "many paths of discovery" in The Architect's Newspaper. This mostly complimentary review did not analyze the building as an Afrofuturist statement. Whatever the intent, the result has a slightly science-fiction feel, from the stair to the exterior plazas.
Many Afrofuturists such as Jack Travis, Malcolm Jones, Dan Kirby and Prince Spears would probably roll their eyes at this, but the Winter Park Public Library has, I think, a kind of sly inversional nod towards the Egyptian pyramids. Probably the only African architecture known to Europeans and Americans, pyramids exist here but are flipped upside down. Whether this is Afrofuturist or not, it remains an architectural reference that no perceptive architect could let pass.
[If cinematographers use the Library complex as a setting for a scene taking place in the future, or on another planet that is hot, sunny, and under frequent flight paths, they could do no better than the Winter Park Library.]
View of the second floor of the library. The bookshelf is at about bar height, and floats away from the glass to the left. The ceiling forms soft shapes overhead as if one's inside a huge sea creature's shell. Photo Richard Reep.
Adjaye himself describes the Library this way: "...a micro-village of three pavilions, each of a different scale and function but which share a common formal language" and notes that the rose-colored concrete walls reflect local fauna. Adjaye may not consider his work Afrofuturist specifically, but his NMAAHC is referenced in Kevin M. Strait and Kinshasa Holman Conwill's book Afrofuturism as a given.
We encourage readers to write in and describe their reaction to the Winter Park Library. We selected it as Building of the Day for Architecture Month because we feel it is an important structure in our region that should be examined closely for clues to the future of design.
-30-
Comments