Architectural Record: ‘Reading Room’ Checks Out 24 Architecturally Significant Libraries in the West and Beyond
Mendenhall Valley Public Library is one of three libraries included in the Architectural Record round up for “Reading Room”.
‘Reading Room’ Checks Out 24 Architecturally Significant Libraries in the West and Beyond
January 31, 2024
“Libraries represent our most fundamental form of social infrastructure. They are places of inclusion, of common ground—public meeting places that level age and class,” writes Seattle-based architectural photographer Lara Swimmer in an introduction to a new tome that pairs her photography of design-forward, award-winning book depositories with accompanying texts written by former RECORD editor Laura Raskin.
Divided into three sections—An Architecture of Reinvention, an Architecture of Change, and an Architecture of Adaptation—Swimmer and Raskin’s Reading Room: New and Reimagined Libraries of the American West showcases a total of 24 new and recently renovated regional branch libraries located across 12 states (predominately but not exclusively Western states). Below are three of the singular libraries, with select photography and full excerpted text, featured in Reading Room. All were built or renovated within the last decade. Because this is the West, there's a focus on projects that frame and connect with the dramatic landscapes that surround them, including a vast state park within Southern California’s Colorado Desert, a glacier-formed, mountain-ringed valley in the south of Alaska, and the salmon-rich Cedar River watershed in Washington’s Puget Sound region.
