NOT YOUR TYPICAL LIBRARY BUILDING
The Corky Gonzales Library, layered in colorful details, is a fresh icon for a changing neighborhood
The new Corky Gonzales Branch Library on West Colfax Avenue is a funky and fresh icon for the surrounding neighborhood.
Architecturally speaking, the new Corky Gonzales Branch Library does all of the wrong things right.
It’s too colorful and too quirky, with bands of bright hues wrapped around its exterior, and walls popping out at odd angles. It’s overloaded with the type of design tricks most buildings use sparingly; it mixes shiny, matte and reflective surfaces, sharp angles with curves. Its book stacks go left while its lighting fixtures go right. It’s busy, dizzy and not so easy to navigate.
And still. Standing tall on the corner of West Colfax Avenue and Irving Street, the building looks right at home, an optimistic beacon at the unofficial entrance to west Denver. If it’s a bit different, that’s just fine because so is this neighborhood.
It was a big job pulling its elements into something cohesive, or at least something fully inclusive of so many ideas, and it took time. City voters approved the Better Denver bond money to pay for the $14 million project — books, computers and furniture included — back in 2007.
The architects, Studiotrope Design Collective, spent many hours asking residents what they wanted in a new library, what would invite them into a place meant to bring an underserved part
of town reading materials, but also meeting rooms, a media lab and play areas for kids. In an area known for its varied demographics — Latino, Asian, white, black, Jewish, middle-class, poor, newcomers, old-timers and immigrants — suggestions were all over the map.
“In the end, everyone wanted it to be their library, said Studiotrope’s Joseph Montalbano. “And we needed some mechanism to pull all of their ideas together.”
And that turned out to be color. Saturated shades from Mexico, earth tones from an African kente cloth — a rainbow of refractions people said they identified with.
They’ve all found a place, starting with the powder-coated aluminum bands that give the 27,000-square-foot structure its bright face on Colfax. Tangerine, turquoise, yellow, vermilion, white, beige and blood orange all come together, delicately, into thin horizontal stripes. They’re meant to symbolize “threads” of diversity that are woven into a unified, communal fabric.
That sets a more-is-more pace for the entire building. The exterior is also clad in concrete, steel, glass, plastic and stucco painted a variety of organic stone shades. Inside banana-colored book shelves meet school-bus-gold stocking carts. Aqua mingles with amber and mint, all on a single shelf.
At times, there is logic to it. Shades are grouped broadly in some areas, such as the children’s Story Tower, where fleshy salmons complement creamy pumpkins. All in all, it’s a color wheel and then some. Then some more.
That’s not to say the building isn’t sophisticated. Montalbano and his team designed what is basically a rectangular box with a fifth wall bisecting its middle at about 30 degrees. The extra wall, thick and capped with translucent plastic, is meant to allow additional light into the building and terminates on the Irving Street side with a sleek glass box that cantilevers out over the sidewalk, creating a sunny reading area.
The structure is energy-efficient, sound-sensitive and wired for the present century. Plus, it has a few amenities you wouldn’t expect from a library, starting with perfectly framed views of the city skyline. There’s a coffee bar on the first floor, started by the nonprofit Girls Inc. that serves up finessed cups of caffeine while teaching entrepreneurial skills to teens.
The top floor opens up to an airy courtyard, a place to meet friends or do a little Internet surfing on a warm summer afternoon. The furniture is hyper-contemporary and the meeting areas flexible — ready for whatever comes next in the changing world of libraries.
All of those things are more, of course, in a space that might do with fewer distractions. But the lack of restraint gives the library a youthfulness many public buildings lack. There’s a lot to notice, making each visit a unique experience.
And in a way, it’s appropriate for a place named after the late Corky Gonzales to push the envelope. Gonzales, who died in 2005, was a poet, activist, and notorious agitator who put Latino civil rights at the top of his agenda. He was a controversial figure in his own right, and no building that bears his name can be faulted for shaking up the status quo in a colorful way.