East elevation of the library

The Mokena library building was a 9000 square foot, single story building that needed an additional 18,000 square feet to meet the requirements of their building program
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There were three prime challenges;

The site was very tight; the square footage that the library needed required a two-story addition that would have to be integrated architecturally with the existing building.
The second challenge was to provide additional natural light and to generally brighten up the interior.
The third challenge was to cope with the fact that we could no longer get an exact match for the original brick.

BCA met the first challenge by building the addition down instead of up. Taking advantage of a sloped site enabled us to recess the lower level into the hillside while still providing many windows for a bright interior. As the addition did not extend above the original building, the strong horizontal emphasis of the original building was maintained.

To lighten the interior, we separated the addition from the original library with a translucent “spine” that brings filtered, natural light to the interior of the building. This 20’ wide spine also solved the brick matching problem by separating the new and old construction. The 20’ distance between the new and old brick is enough to conceal the fact that the bricks are not an exact match.

The yellow shaded areas were added to the original library. Careful attention to project phasing enabled BCA to triple the size of this library with only 4 days of down time.