M.Hill Role: Design Team Member while w/ I.M.Pei & Partners / Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.  Lead Designer: James Ingo Freed.

This State-of-the-art public library located in San Francisco, California was designed to complete San Francisco’s Civic Center. It echoes with a modernist attitude the materials and massing of neighboring Beaux-Arts institutions, fronting on the Civic Center with two symmetrical façades. The library’s two other facades make a contemporary response to the adjacent commercial district.

The design is organized to permit passage into and through the building and out to the opposite side of the full-block site. The Library is thus both a destination and a link connecting the modern city with its cultural core, a bridge between the people of San Francisco and the institutions that serve and enrich them.

Internal organization centers around a monumental open staircase and a five-story atrium, 60 feet in diameter, that provides a luminous hub of orientation. A glass-enclosed Periodicals Reading Room, suspended above, further helps to draw light into the core of the 300′ x 200′ building. Bridges link the different precincts and reinforce the metaphor of connection in a library that provides access to both advanced online information systems and more than three million books on open/closed stacks. The New Main Library attempts to integrate the different people, interests, and precincts of the city, both traditionally and electronically, physically and symbolically, now and well into the future.