During its creation, Green Square was Australia’s largest urban renewal project, transforming an industrial inner-city precinct of Sydney into a new town centre with housing for 61,000 people and jobs for 21,000. Questions about how to make this freshly master planned district into a sustainable, liveable community were central to the brief for the public library. How could the new neighbourhood be given heart and soul? How could people be brought together when public space is at a premium? And what is the future of the library?

The solution places the library below ground, preserving the precious public space on top as a focal point for the new town centre. A selection of elements pop up into the plaza as geometric shapes, blurring the boundaries between indoors and out, and able to operate independently outside opening hours. A wedge-shaped, glazed pavilion provides the main entrance, leading down into the library itself, which is arranged around a lushly planted, circular sunken garden cut through the ground plane. A beacon-like, six-storey tower emerges above, with a stack of reading rooms, music and computer labs below a colourfully lit plant room. A trapezoid auditorium was added, scooping down from upper to lower levels, for readings, performance and conversation.

This is a building detailed for the individual as well as the city. As well as reclaiming outdoor space for the neighbourhood as a whole, it offers human-scaled places for unexpected uses and private moments. The wide steps leading up to the plaza are simultaneously sun loungers or bleacher seating; the coloured niches in the childrens’ library portholes, reading nests or hamster wheels. The competition conditions were liberating creatively, the challenges of the site warranting experimentation and prompting the kind of generous, connected city making that welcomes inhabitation and participation.