Rockdale Library

Rockdale Library sits behind and above the heritage Rockdale Town Hall on Rocky Point Road in Sydney’s south. It was designed by Brewster Hjorth Architects with CK Design International for Rockdale City Council, now Bayside Council, and built by Kane Constructions, adding roughly 2,400 square metres over three and a half levels. Geneva supplied the furniture.

The clever part of the build is the join. The new library and the existing Town Hall were made a single building in two fire isolated compartments sharing one air conditioning system, with glazed facades and an atrium pulling daylight into a deep plan. The site sits under the Sydney Airport flight path, so construction elements were detailed specifically to reduce noise and vibration.

For a furniture package, the consequence of that plan is that no two rooms look alike. The children’s collection is tree form joinery under a painted sky. The local studies room is a curved timber drum lined with glass cases. The upper study levels are white, glazed and hung with oversized red drum pendants. The young adult zone is brick, timber and double height. One family of furniture repeated through all of it would have read as procurement rather than design. A different scheme in every room would have read as an argument.

What holds the package together is colour and silhouette rather than model. Red, orange and green run through every level, taken from the carpet and the lighting rather than set against them, and each room gets one or two strong shapes: a V backed swivel lounge on the browsing floor, high backed tweed chairs by the brick wall, a kidney shaped banquette in the Chill Zone. Everything else stays quiet. The effect is that someone walking from the children’s room up to the top study level reads continuity without ever seeing the same chair twice.

Underneath the colour it is a civic library, open long hours, used by the whole local government area and refurbished rarely. The loose furniture has to answer that. Upholstery is commercial grade in patterns busy enough to disguise wear. Lounge chairs sit on swivel bases with glides, and the stools and visitor chairs use sled and four leg frames that survive being dragged. Tables come at three heights, low in the lounge settings, standard at the reading and research tables, and high at the balustrade perch, so one floor can hold a school group at four in the afternoon and a job seeker at ten in the morning.

If there is a transferable lesson in it, it is that a building with this much personality does not need furniture with an opinion of its own. The rooms are already doing the talking. The seating and the tables earn their place by being the right height, the right posture and the right colour, and by still being serviceable in ten years, which in a civic library is the only test that counts.