Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh at Squirrel Hill
Pittsburgh, PA
completed 2005
photos by Massery Photography
Honor Award
AIA Pittsburgh Design Awards 2007
The renovation of the 18,000sf main Squirrel Hill branch with a 7,000sf addition redefined the library’s role within the neighborhood as an information center accommodating the diverse needs of the local community. The expansive light-filled addition supports change and shifting patterns of use over time using adaptable and flexible systems that allow the library to be easily and constantly reorganized, reinvented and re-imagined.
"I must confess that I've been tempted to publish some of my reflections, but a reader is a traveler through a ready-made landscape.... For me the greatest joy is to be able to submerge myself for a few hours every day in a human time that otherwise would be alien to me. A lifetime is not enough. If I may purloin half of a sentence by Borges: 'a library is a door in time.'"
—Dominquez, Carlos Maria. The House of Paper. 42.