RI's Newest Library Says, "Please Touch": Architectural Critic Will Morgan

RI's Newest Library Says, "Please Touch": Architectural Critic Will Morgan

A tile in the ceramic wall in the children's part of the Tiverton Public Library says "Please Touch."

That invitation pretty much sums up the welcoming feeling that embraces visitors and patrons of Rhode Island's newest public library.

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For many Rhode Islanders, Tiverton means the Sakonnet River, Evelyn's seafood shack, and granite boulders left behind by the last Ice Age.

But in the center of the East Bay town is the five-year-old library and community center, which is one of the most joyful new civic structures built in this state in ages.

Union Station, the Providence architects, have created a landmark that evokes Tiverton's agricultural and maritime history–combining the spirit of a 19th-century railroad station, a Gilded Age seaside cottage, and a Rhode Island barn–with the amenities of a 21st-century library.

The 24,000-square-foot library and town meeting place is chock full of functional spaces–reading and seminar rooms, children's activity room, cafe, computer areas–yet it reads as a comfortable seaside house or a country school.

There is no real town here, so the library's important civic presence is reinforced by placing the building upon a grass pedestal framed by a classic New England stone wall.

The library is very much a part of Tiverton's fast-disappearing rural landscape, as large windows link the inside with the carefully natural groupings of trees and rocks outside (shaped by Traverse Landscape Architecture).

As Union Studio is committed to "saving the world from sprawl," their neo-traditional aesthetic might seem a little overly focused on details and border on the cute.

But at Tiverton, the result is a good balance of nostalgia, fancy, and functionalism.

Since no one can afford to replicate the materials and craftsmanship of New England libraries of the 19th century, it is not surprising that the interior is more appropriately Scandinavian Modern than Richardson Romanesque.

Furnishings aside, everything about the interior is designed to making the library workable and pleasant.

The librarian's "desk" is at the center of a large two-story, naturally lit room that contains open shelves, computer stations, and reading areas.

Fanning out from this core are a teen library, a local history repository, seminar, and conference rooms; two meeting spaces, along with the kitchen and bathrooms, are available to the community in the evenings.

At the western end of the library is a giant covered porch that extends the interior to the outside, and offers a place for impromptu gatherings.

The adult reading room, with its fireplace and views out to the countryside, is like a comfortable parlor at your Aunt Min's old Victorian house.

But the happiest place here is the children's library, which occupies an entire wing at the rear of the building, complete with an activity room, computers, and interactive displays.

Wrapping around the computer module is a ceramic wall by local ceramicists Mika Seeger and Peter Geisser, which invites touching the alphabet formed of various town icons: barns, lighthouses, lobsters, boats, and quahogs.

The same artists created another mural in the library lobby, the Trees of Tiverton, which shows twenty-six trees composed of hundreds of student-provided self-portraits.

Maybe one reason that the Tiverton Library is such a success and a boost to the town's identity is the fact that the community was so involved in its planning.

As the Tiverton library demonstrates, good architecture makes it easier to fulfill our civic duty of supporting an educated citizenry.

Or, as Bill Moyers wrote, "When a library is open, democracy is open, too."

 

 

Architecture Critic Will Morgan wrote about the international competition for the new library in Helsinki, Finland for Competitions Magazine.