San Francisco Main Library

San Francisco voters approved a bond measure in 1988 to build a new main library. The following year the Library Commission chose two firms as its architects: the New Yorkers of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and, from San Francisco, Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris. James Ingo Freed, the Pei Cobb Freed partner in charge, designed it with Cathy Simon; the San Francisco office acted as associate architect.

Work started on 15 March 1993 on the Marshall Square site in the Civic Center, and the doors opened on 18 April 1996. Bond funds of $104.5 million and private gifts of $22 million paid for it. Compared with the earlier main library, which stood on the spot now taken by the Asian Art Museum, the new one provides double the usable space.

Meant to complete the Civic Center, the building takes up the materials and massing of the Beaux-Arts institutions around it in a modernist spirit, and its plan lets people walk right through it, from one side of the city block it fills to the other. The Sierra White granite of the facade, from the quarry that supplied the stone for other Civic Center buildings, fits that style. On the Grove and Hyde street sides the facade turns more contemporary, in keeping with the commercial activity of Market Street.

Inside, a skylight lets daylight into the central atrium, a circle 60 feet (about 18 m) across and five storeys high. Bridges link the floors across light wells, and a grand staircase rises four storeys beside an illuminated wall piece that spells out the names of over a hundred authors, a work by the artist Nayland Blake.

The structure sits on 142 base isolators, each built from rubber sandwiched between stainless steel, with a lead core inside to absorb shocks. An 18-inch (about 46 cm) gap around the building lets it move independently of the ground, and the design aims at resistance to earthquakes up to magnitude 8.3.

Around the atrium, intimate corner rooms are devoted to the city's communities and interests, among them the Chinese Center, the African American Center and the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center. Others are the Wallace Stegner Environmental Center, the music center called Steve Silver Beach Blanket Babylon and the Book Arts & Special Collections center. In each, inlaid hardwood floors, wool rugs and upholstered chairs set the tone.

The library also displays artworks. One is a three-storey wall covered with 50,000 annotated cards taken from the old card catalogue, by Ann Chamberlain and Ann Hamilton; two others are by Alice Aycock, one of them a spiral staircase in a glass-walled reading room.

A public facility of the Civic Center, the library stands at 100 Larkin Street, between Fulton Street and Grove Street.