阿拉伯公共图书馆.docVIP

外文资料原文 ARABIAN PUBLIC LIBRARY In the far-flung suburban expanses of greater Phoenix, civic life can be hard to come by. Gated communities define-and depopulate-the street scene. Wide arterials make driving breezy and walking dicey. Social mixing happens mostly at malls. Yet metropolitan Phoenix has kept a hold on civic culture, and nowhere is the hold firmer than in the local support of that most idealistic and benevolent of municipal programs, the public library. A major marker of this support is the consistent commissioning of first-rate architecture. The Burton Barr Central Library, by Will BruderPartners, set a rigorous standard when it opened in 1995, and since then a half-dozen or so branches-most recently the Palo Verde Library, by Gould Evans and Wendell Burnette, and the Desert Broom Library, by Richard Bauer-have put public libraries on the itineraries of serious architecture tourists. The latest addition to the tour is the Arabian Library, another Richard Bauer project. Contributing editor Nancy Levinson is the director of the Phoenix Urban Research Lab at the College of Design at Arizona State University. Before moving out West, she cofounded and coedited Harvarrd Design Magazine. The Arabian is located in exurban Scottsdale(and named, by that city’s custom, for a breed of horse). The natural setting is stunning, with the 4000-foot-high peaks of the McDowell Mountain Preserve dominating vistas to the northeast. The built environs are humdrum, with acres of resale-ready blandburbs stretching to the edges of the protected range. But it is precisely this contradictory context that has spurred the designers to product a conceptually rich and ambitious building. As architect James Richard says, “We struggled with the ordinariness of the surroundings, with the minimarts, the chain stores, the surface lots. How, in the midst of this generic development, do you make an authentic place?” Richard and his partner, interior designer Kelly Bauer, answered this questi