NADAAA Creates a Light-Filled Library in Boston, Massachusetts

2021 Best of Year winner for Library

Slipped into place like a book on a shelf, the 13,500-square-foot public library, designed by NADAAA, fits neatly into a corner site with three street frontages in the city’s working-class Dorchester neighborhood. The terra-cotta panel cladding is given various treatments—scalloped or ribbed, glazed or unglazed, dark or light—creating historical and contextual relationships for the main facades while giving volume and mass to what is otherwise a thin rain-screen system. “One facade is a monumental, single-pitch gable responding to the main entry,” NADAAA founder and design principal Nader Tehrani notes. “The other is a repetitive gable, abstractly mirroring the houses to the east.” A folded roof acts as a mediating surface, bringing the two sides together. Inside, the circulation desk offers a hub around which zones for adults, teens, and younger patrons radiate; each has its own discrete rows of stacks leading to indoor and outdoor reading areas. By cutting a wedge out of the southern end of the building, the design team not only allowed for light and air to reach deep into the interior but also a garden plot replete with native plants; a heritage oak shades a community room and garden at the other end of the library—nature and culture in fruitful accord.