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This is a proposal for a new library on a site that has historically been the heart of this midsize city. The site has figured in city master plans of the last one hundred years, including an early plan by John Nolan. The site is the terminus of the principal east-west street of the city, and is located on a prominence on Lake Worth, looking east to the barrier island town of Palm Beach.

Clematis Street, leading to the site from the west, is now a small scale street of restaurants among larger blocks of five to nine story buildings toward the water. A triangular fountain at the west end of the site, just a few years old, has quickly become a gathering point. The eastern part of the site has been the main staging area of a yearly music festival that attracts tens of thousands of people.

The criteria for the project included several urban design considerations. The city wanted to connect Clematis Street and the existing Centennial Fountain plaza with the waterfront, while simultaneously commissioning a workable library facility three times the size of the existing library on the site. They wanted to continue to accommodate the annual music festival, and to maintain the fountain. And they wanted to create a civic symbol for their city. The library program provided for a cafe, and community outreach spaces for after hour meetings, research, and engage the activity of the fountain plaza. The design committee minimized the need for surface parking, as so many existing parking structures were within a few blocks of the site.

Our inclination was to organize several buildings around a new courtyard, and to create a new terrace on the east (river) side, both spaces located on an extension of the Clematis street axis. By this means, we proposed to draw people from the crowded street and fountain plaza, though a series of intimately scaled, but varied spaces, to the seriously under used river esplanade. The two larger buildings were connected on the second level. The outreach meeting spaces, and the cafe were placed in a free standing building. The plaza level cafe sits on both the fountain plaza and the new library courtyard.

The buildings are composed and sited to serve the creation of the new spaces. They are a picturesque group of structures meant to be attractive from all sides, and intended to make pedestrian movement through the site fun and stimulating. The courtyard and the river terraces extend the axis of the existing street, teasing crowds by degree from the popular fountain plaza to the water front, and thereby fulfilling the project's primary urban responsibility. The design derives from specific regional traditions, building practices, climate and culture, without aspiring to parochialism. The project would be among larger and bulkier commercial buildings at the waterfront. The basic composition of the pieces, the monumental language of the buttressed walls of the buildings, the typology of the constituent elements, and the iconography were all developed to convey the highest public aspirations for an important civic building on a prominent site.