Speaking volumes

摘要

Describing the library he recently completed in the modest Westchester neighborhood of Los Angeles, ALeks Istanbullu could be accused of downplaying the finished product: "It's basically a box for books," he says. But in the same way designers since the early modernists have been reinventing "boxes" for residences and offices, his eponymous Santa Monica firm has done more than comfortably meet the program; they've inserted straightforward formal elements to improve but not overpower the facility's function. Says the architect, "I have this thing about letting things be." Part of an ambitious, 5-year undertaking by the city of Los Angeles to commission 32 such facilities, the Westchester-Loyola Village Branch Library fell to Istanbullu's firm after they submitted a winning proposal for the project. But the firm had never completed a library, accustomed more to residential work in the local market, so they set about learning the basics of the typology by the books and by the numbers. Their success in the venture can be measured in the same terms: The 41,000-volume facility has drawn positive reviews and substantial crowds from the surrounding ethnically mixed, middle-class neighborhood. Located at the northwest corner of a park, displacing a library on the same site, the new branch invites visitors through a landscaped terrace to a partially hidden entrance. Two tones of stuc-co riff gently off the Spanish Colonial palette of the region, while vertical aluminum cladding hints at the rows of book spines found within.