Civic Center Library Remodel reveals Beauty of Wright’s Design
by Laurie Thompson
We invite you to visit the Library’s newly remodeled space on the 4th floor of the Marin County Civic Center under the dome.
Processing operations have moved behind the scenes revealing the library’s clean design and elegant curves, both hallmarks of Wright’s concept for Marin’s Civic Center.
According to Wright’s protege Aaron Green:
Symbolically, under the central dome were located the Board of Supervisors chambers, the center of government, and the county library, the center of knowledge. Regarding the location of the library, Frank Lloyd Wright said, ‘It will be educational for children to expose them to government as a point of access to the library.’ The circular form of the library had a prototype from Mr. Wright’s previous work, the library at Florida Southern College…. With that background experience, I finalized the layout of the Marin County Library similar to the interior layout Mr. Wright had provided for the Florida Building….. Book stacks radiate[d] from the center around the perimeter of the circular space. The reading tables were located in the central open space….. True to Frank Lloyd Wright’s philosophy of lighting, the main reading room could be lighted by glare-free, shadow-free, indirect light, with no fixtures visible.
- Green, Aaron;. The Marin County Civic Center: An Architecture for Democracy, 1990.
Originally published at https://annetkent.kontribune.com.
