Southwest Neighborhood Library & Park Washington, DC
Services Provided
Urban Design
Construction Documentation
People Involved
Joe Chambers
Xibei Song
Lyn Wenzel
Gaëlle Gourmelon
The design for the Southwest Neighborhood Library activates the northern edge of the library's terrace as a “front porch", knitting together the new library and the adjacent Park into one coherent space.
Southwest Neighborhood Library is located in a changing neighborhood in Southwest Washington, DC, not far from the city’s Waterfront development. The landscape scope for this project includes an outdoor entry space, a terraced porch area, bioretention planting, extensive green roofs, and a new parking lot.
As the project progressed, the design team worked with DC DPR to implement a series of limited, but high-impact, improvements to the adjacent 3rd and I St Park in order to merge the two entities into one coherent place. The new design approach opens the library to this park by locating the main entrance at the building’s northwest corner and reorienting the building, along with the new porch terrace, towards the park itself. The terrace’s northern edge is articulated as a long series of steps that both encourage access to the park and provide a small amount of prospect – a perfect place for reading, meeting, and conversing.
The remaining landscaped areas around the building include a series of walled bioretention planters that house native planting and treat stormwater captured from the building’s roof.
A renovated parking lot, loading dock, and dumpster storage area at the east side of the building is screened by a series of carefully preserved existing hedges along with several new planted areas.
Improvements to the park space were conducted within an extremely limited budget. Accordingly the space, whose character is defined by a grove of mature Willow Oaks, required a careful surgical approach in order to minimize damage to the grove, which included several heritage trees, while maximizing the value of the new enhancements. Circulation along the southern edge of the park was expanded, and an existing underutilized plaza was narrowed slightly in order to enhance its relationship with the library and introduce additional planting at the heart of the park. Finally, a new understory layer, comprised of ecologically-productive native trees and several beds of native grasses and perennials, was introduced throughout the park in order to provide seasonal interest for users and food for local wildlife.
The library, designed to LEED Gold standards, incorporates a series of innovative architectural components as well as a large extensive green roof which further reduces runoff during storm events.
