Surry Hills Library
(3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)
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Location:
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405 Crown Street
Surry Hills
Sydney
NSW 2010
Australia
coordinates:
-33.8859634 151.2136993
Building names(s): Surry Hills Library
Architect/Designer:
FJMT
architect website:
Other Information:
Completion date: June 2009
Function: library
library website: www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.auopening hours:
Monday: 10am – 6pm
Tuesday: 10am – 8pm
Wednesday: 10am – 6pm
Thursday: 10am -8pm
Friday: 10am – 6pm
Saturday and Sunday: 10am – 4pm
Awards:
Australian Institute of Architects’ 2010 NSW Architecture Awards:
2010 Milo Dunphy Award for Sustainable Architecture
2010 John Verge Award for Interior Architecture
2010 Architecture Award for Public Buildings
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Last update: 11 August, 2010 | Suggested By LT
The jury said: “The Surry Hills Library and Community Centre delivers a wide range of services including a community library, childcare centre, and meeting spaces over four floors on a modest footprint. Overall, the building presents as a finely crafted piece of joinery, magnified to sit comfortably within the scale of the public domain. The jury was impressed with the project’s commitment to sustainability and the elegant way many of the initiatives have been integrated from first principles into the building form and its operation.” They added: “Surry Hills Library and Community Centre is a confident and considered piece of civic architecture. The building has been warmly embraced by the local community, and the client and the architect are to be commended for their commitment to delivering an exemplary outcome that eschews conventional notions of contemporary public architecture for local communities.”
The building incorporates many innovations in sustainable design, but also seeks to integrate these into the architecture and explore the expressive potential of such systems. This is most evident in the emblematic ‘environmental-atrium’ that rises in a prismatic spire-like form to clearly identify the new building and public place.
The ‘environmental-atrium’ composed of a series of crystal-like, triangular, tampering airshafts that draw-in, clean and passively cool out-side air. Experimental use of plant-life for bio-filtration of pollutants is integrated in the form of gardens of specially selected plants within these glass enclosures.
Natural daylight is filtered through these glass shafts and gardens deep into the interiors. The array of environmental initiatives intrinsic to the design, also include thermal labyrinth for passive filtering and tempering of the air, solar tracking timber louvre systems, automated fabric shading, mixed mode ventilation, extensive photovoltaic array, geothermal cooling bores, green roof, rainwater collection and recycling, sustainable material selection.