Kirkwood Public Library -- New Castle, Delaware
22,500 SF | children’s library | young adult reading | information technology center | EMS station
The Kirkwood Public Library is inspired by lessons learned from the polemical text of architects Robert Venturi and
Denise Scott Brown in the interest of creating a community center along a busy American highway. The library is
situated on Kirkwood highway which is populated with strip malls and fast food restaurants. The objective was to
create a new branch library for a growing diverse neighborhood that would serve as the iconic community center
among the strip shopping centers and parking lots. The generative idea was to create an iconic building in an otherwise
unremarkable landscape as a billboard, expressing its function to the community as a civic building for reading, learning
and exploration. The image of the building is that of abstracted stacks of books piled on their side expressed in
horizontal cement board siding.