The architectural vision for the new Parmly Billings Library is a sustainable and dynamic pavilion of community pride and iconic presence — a volume of light, transparency, and color that grows from the fabric of the urban streetscape.
The library’s long form speaks to the Rimrocks as well as the long trains that cross Montana’s prairie, connecting people and products across the continent. The library’s architecture is a hybrid of both the handsome and beautifully restored 19th century main train depot on Montana Avenue and the powerful block-long warehouse buildings of brick masonry and metal that serve to shelter the transfer of resources at this point of commerce.
The new library will be a vessel to hold knowledge of the world as we know it. Its story will not only be about what is told on the pages of the books on its shelves, but also about the navigating power of the technology it houses. As a departure platform for the information highway, it connects in every direction with the mere touch of a finger or utterance of a voice.
From foot, bicycle, or car, the library will appear as a warm/cool shimmering and transparent container reflecting the nearby cityscape, landscape and sky. A landscape of native trees, scrubs, and ground covers will create the parking garden and library approach. A community pocket park faces the main entry along the library’s southeast side, while the stone walled courtyard off the library’s meeting room will provide a wind shelter for outdoor events on the first warm days of spring or the last days of summer. A procession of columns and landscaping will buffer the pedestrian from the traffic of Sixth Avenue North. The parking garden will be sustained by water harvested from the library’s roof.
This library will be both familiar and surprising, massive yet minimal, mysteriously cloaked yet transparently ethereal — a form that carries both sunlight and shadow, snow and wind with unexpected reflections and connections to the place. It will be a grand space with a vast window looking into the landscape and the future. It will be a comfortable room with a view in which to learn and to grow, a place to answer a question, plan a trip, discover a career, engage an idea, a place to riff on life as it is or daydream about life as it could be.
All architecture grows from the outside in and the inside out. It grows from listening responsively to the client and context. The most remarkable touchstones of architecture are timeless markers that capture the ideas, vision and spirit of their epoch. They are honest, direct, and original in their celebration of the people they serve and the places they inhabit. As architects, we can never know in our own lifetimes if we have created a building that meets the measure of the timeless. We can only work together as citizens, dreamers, builders, and patrons, to give reality to an architectural landmark that speaks to who we were and who we aspire to be. Let us make the new Parmly Billings Library a resonant marker of our time and this place.
Will Bruder is the lead architect on the new downtown Billings public library. His Arizona-based firm worked on the library design with O2 Architects of Billings.
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