[Atlanta] Morrow Branch Library - Scogin Elam

[wizum]

Here is another Scogin elam building. This Library is one of three in the Clayton country Library system, and in my opinion the most interesting design. From the architects website:

date of completion: summer 1991

building area: 10,000 square feet

construction cost: $760,000

The Morrow Branch Library, a 10,000 square foot 59,000 volume community facility, is an institutional loner in a horse pasture bounded by a strip shopping center, a wet weather draw, a busy county road, and subdivision houses that are sideways-facing and self-concerned, that refuse to acknowledge the road's existence. The site is flat, filled with heat, and yellow topped bitter weeds, loblolly pines and june bug beetles. Its most extraordinary feature is its ceiling of blue sky and bright clouds brushed by pine needles.

The one acre site is consumed by the program of building and parking and the best view is up.

The scheme reflects this, with glass and views high up and enclosing walls down low. Other influences are more abstract, distant connections, such as the headquarters library, the county courthouse, the close-by neighborhoods Rex and Ellenwood, and the cardinal points of the compass. Along with the property lines, the lines of influence from these entities give form to the building.

The building plan is, in effect, an asymmetrical, skewed dogtrot with a dividing breezeway/corridor with rooms off both sides. To the north of the corridor are the public meeting room, toilets, and administrative services. Intruding into the corridor is the circulation desk with visual access to both building entrances, the restroom and the public meeting room entrances. The children's collection and the general collection are to the south. Along the south property line, just outside of the children's and general collection is a small garden with a depressed area that will hold water and act as a reflecting ditch.

A vertical steel and glass tower marks the center of the site and of the building and signifies the center of a new reality for the branch library. It is a negative center support from which the mushroom-like ceiling/roof forms emerge and rise toward the perimeter and rest on a simple post and beam steel structure. Exterior walls are of glass and Georgia red-clay-colored synthetic stucco. The roofs are tire tread rubber.

[wizum]

Here is the link to the project on the architects website:

http://www.msmearch.com/libraries/morrow.html

my flickr photo set of this project:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wizum/s...7594299456005/

Other buildings posted on Pushpullbar from Scogin Elam:
Turner Chapel
Buckhead Library

Pushpullbar post on architects

[wizum]

Here is a screen shot of the building via Google Earth

[wizum]

here is the kmz file for the Library...

general location of the library is in the southern subburbs of the Atlanta area about 10 minutes south of the Atlanta airport and about 5 minutes off of the I-75 interstate highway.

[wizum]

here is a shot approaching the building from the north...

[wizum]

The library is a designed as a basic square shape. But as you can see the roofs of this building are what create interest in its design. They open and tilt in different directions to allow light to penetrate the interior spaces. The obvious part is the large tower extension roof piece that creates the core space of the building...

[wizum]

here is a shot of that core space... the control/check-out desk... notice that this shot was taken from outside looking through the front glass door. when I took these shots the library was closed (Sunday)...

[wizum]

This shot is as if you were to park and approach the building from the front parking area and is the view you would probably have if you were to visit the library...

[wizum]

here is a view of the left corner front of the building. behind the lower glass form is a sitting area inside that is about 3 feet lower than the parking level...

[wizum]

here is a closer-up view of that sitting area from the outside...