The Adams Street Branch sits along a working commercial corridor in Dorchester, between a row of triple-deckers on one side and the lower-rise scale of single-family houses on the other. It reads two ways at once: as a single civic gable facing Adams Street, and as a series of smaller gables stepping down toward the rear, holding the line of the houses behind it. The building had to navigate both — a public institution legible from the street, and a quiet neighbor at the back fence.
A great oak sat on the site. It had stood there for generations and was a fixture of the neighborhood in a way few buildings ever are. Preserving it became a community compromise we went to considerable lengths to honor — the building’s footprint, the cantilever along the rear, and the geometry of the cladding all defer to the tree. The Boston Public Library asked for a building meant to last sixty years or more, and we read that brief through the oak: the building reaches as far as it can toward where it wants to be, stops short, and is clad in terracotta meant to weather alongside the tree for the rest of its life.
Inside, reading rooms extend out from a central circulation desk so that a single staff member can keep eyes on the entire library at once. A hybrid structure of steel columns and glulam beams carries a rolling vaulted roof, and plywood fins between the beams follow the line of the vault. The geometry shifts as you walk through; the program organizes itself underneath.
