Glenroy Community Hub

Comments

Glenroy Community Hub nestles considerately into the neighbourhood’s residential scale. As a biophilic ‘Healthy Building’, the library is designed to improve occupants’ lives by providing experiences of beauty, comfort, joy and learning. The building seeks to function like a forest, connecting people, place, and nature through a garden experience. Dramatic glulam timber beams and gardens are the library’s most striking design elements. The structural glulam beams (from local sustainably-sourced timber, minimising embodied carbon) are first seen outside the building; they form a welcoming arbour facing the Bridget Shortell Reserve. The arbour creates a transitional space, establishing an inhabitable connection with the parkland and drawing the outdoors into the building. Once inside, the diagonal, glulam grid presents a dynamic structural pattern to the library ceiling. Slender columns meet the glulam grid at intersections evoking a forest canopy which collects the volume of the library. Integrated into the expressed structure, triangular clerestory windows bring daylight deep into the building, illuminating the spaces within, which provide a variety of scale, privacy, and experiences for the building users. Curvilinear walls in a crisp white brick define the building zones. Brick forms inset with timber joinery anchor the building, providing a tactile backdrop for a botanically inspired, seasonal palette. The interior palette, also inspired by seasonal responses, features botanical colour schemes that subtly demarcate areas. Natural textures are seen in practical materials like plywood, linoleum, and rubber, offering durability, sustainability and acoustic properties. These robust, hard-wearing materials are easily replaced or repaired. Designed to generate 25% more energy than it uses, offsetting operational greenhouse emissions, this energy-positive building is Australia’s first community building to achieve Passive House (PH) certification and is also designed for Living Building Challenge Petal and Net-Zero Energy certification.