GREENPOINT LIBRARY AND ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION CENTER | Brooklyn, New York, USA | 2019

Architects: Marble Fairbanks
Client: Brooklyn Public Library
General Contractor: Westerman Construction\
Structural Engineers: Robert Silman Associates
Landscape Architects: SCAPE 
Photographers: Marble Fairbanks

Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center Brooklyn, NY The Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center is one of fifty-eight neighborhood libraries that make up the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) system. Distributed throughout the borough of Brooklyn, this network of libraries provides essential educational, cultural, and social services to the diverse communities they serve.

The new Greenpoint branch will replace an existing outdated library and will double the size of the previous building. The new building will provide significantly enlarged indoor and outdoor spaces to house expanded activities related to the exploration of the environment as well as everyday library use.

The library’s mission is to become a community hub for environmental awareness, activism, and education. Funded in part from a Legacy Grant from the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund (GCEF), this project is the result of an active engagement between BPL and the local community.

The new Library and Environmental Education Center serves residents of all ages by partnering with local environmental groups to offer opportunities to learn about the rich history of Greenpoint and its specific ecological context.

Many of those environmental groups are represented on the Community Advisory Committee (CAC), which acted as an integral participant in the design team’s inclusive design process.

The new Greenpoint Library will offer a centralized venue where local organizations can meet and work collaboratively on initiatives that seek to benefit the residents and the natural environment.

The primary program elements are adult, young adult, and children reading rooms and collection spaces, and community spaces for library programming as well as for the Environmental Education Center.

Lab spaces for wet and dry interactive projects, including a large community event space which can be divided into two lab spaces, a lounge, small meeting rooms, and staff spaces are distributed on the two main floors.

The new library provides street level exterior green space, clear visual connections to interior activities, and two accessible green roofs on the upper floors.

The building is targeting LEED platinum, significantly exceeding required LEED goals, becoming a demonstration project for innovative approaches to sustainable design and a learning tool for the community.

Four primary concepts drive the design solution:

Massing: The building massing is two volumes, responding to the immediate context and creating a street level civic landscaped space as part of the entry sequence into the building. The rooftops of the stepped massing are outdoor landscape and educational spaces that form a strong connection between the indoor and outdoor program.

Landscape: A street-level exterior green plaza and two accessible green roofs on the upper floors provide space for specific types of educational purposes. The plaza design, Glacial Streetscape, offers the public an engaging civic space that demonstrates sustainability and reinterprets the environmental history of the region. The lower roof, Reading Nest, provides an outdoor seating/performance space with a rainwater-harvesting cistern, outdoor eco-lab, and a planted mound that surrounds the seating. The upper roof, Alpine Classroom, provides demonstration planters, a bench with storage, and pollinator extensive and serves as more of a working classroom

Material: The exterior cladding consists of two primary materials: wood and concrete. Through a process of sandblasting 2” x 12” boards, a pattern is created that accentuates the natural properties of wood through relief. Typical imperfections (like knots) form the most visually compelling patterns due to the complexity of the rings. These boards are used as vertical siding on the upper volume of the building. On the lower volume, the boards are used as formwork to create precast concrete planks that have the reverse pattern of the wood.

Environment: Urban-scaled windows are located within the building volume to maximize natural light and to form strong relationships to the landscape and urban context. These windows are designed to showcase the main program spaces to the public on the two streets. Each window has a unique solar screening approach specific to its orientation and to how it relates to the adjacent outdoor space. Additionally, four smaller vertical windows are located near the entry configured geometrically to capture sunlight at summer and winter solstice as well as the spring and fall equinox.