Surry Hills Library and Community Centre

add to favorites

send to a friend

Project Name: Surry Hills Library and Community Centre
Construction year: 2009
Website:
Address: 405 Crown Street, Surry Hills , SYDNEY - Australia

Architect(s) : Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp (www.fjmt.com.au)
Project Category: Cultural | Public

Latitude: -33.886
Longitude: 151.214

Consolidating the community

This is a new type of ‘hybrid’ public building for Sydney, integrating into one community-scaled facility, a public library / resource centre, flexible and specialist community space and childcare. The design seeks to create an open and inviting community facility with strong connection to its setting, and an expression of community values of equity, transparency and sustainability.

It is a welcoming community place for all ages and social groups providing facilities that embody the values of equity of access to information and resources that are essential to build communities. A key objective for the project is to establish a new Australian excellence standard of environmentally sustainable design in civic buildings.

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.

Contributed by ArchiTeam