For more than 30 years, you could walk by Squirrel Hill's busiest corner and never even know a library was there. Located on the second floor above a bank (now a real estate office) and a parking garage at Forbes and Murray avenues, the library was recessed from the street and hidden behind a hedge row.

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette The library's expansion gives the Squirrel Hill corner of Forbes and Murray avenues a new look. Click photo for larger image. On the Net Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Squirrel Hill branch

The new library, designed by Arthur Lubetz Associates of Oakland, reaches out and grabs you. A glass cube of a lobby, 30 feet tall, juts diagonally onto the Forbes Avenue sidewalk. Immediately inside, Lubetz breaks the aesthetic news: exposed ductwork and I-beams, glass block walls, steel stair treads, a footbridge overhead that leads from the glass-walled elevator to the library.

This is library-as-urban-loft-adventure, another creative twist in Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's ambitious first round of renovations. Four down -- Main, Brookline, Homewood and Squirrel Hill -- and one to go, Woods Run, where renovation begins this summer. (A new business branch opened Downtown earlier this year.)

That all of the completed renovations have been distinct and, to varying degrees, daring, owes to their being the product of four different, innovative Pittsburgh-based architectural firms. Lubetz, over almost 40 years, has built a reputation as a risk-taker whose provocative and often uncompromising designs emphasize the art of architecture and its power to communicate.

This one softens the outlaw attitude. It's engaging, stimulating and celebratory of the city, practical in its choice of common materials and elegant in the sometimes suprising ways in which they are used.

Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Al Bohntinsky touches up signage for the expanded children's area in the newly remodeled Squirrel Hill library. Click photo for larger image.

Lubetz wants the architecture to tell passers-by "that the library is an open place that had changed substantially from what it was before and that it is continuing to change."

Change, he hopes, is conveyed by the movement of people inside and, over time, by the shifting patina of the exterior's copper panels as they age. The theme carries over inside, to an open, flexible space where stacks become walls, book carts are on wheels and lightweight chairs and tables can be picked up and moved. It will allow the interior to be reconfigured as needed in decades to come.

Social expectations

For the $4.7 million library renovation by A. Martini & Sons, Lubetz kept only the bones of the 1972 building by Liff, Justh & Chetlin Architects: the limestone columns, which recalled for him a Greek hilltop temple, and the steel support structure, now painted Cherokee red in homage to Frank Lloyd Wright.

The concrete and limestone terrace, which framed the library on three sides, has been enclosed, partly with the blue-green glass wall that overlooks the corner of Forbes and Murray (over the real estate office) and partly with the horizontal, standing-seam copper panels (over the garage). Along the glass walls stretches a long, L-shaped, carpet-covered bench that will give Barnes & Noble and the Squirrel Hill Cafe a run for their money as hangouts for the neighborhood literati.

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Heather McNaugher, information technology project coordinator, prepares the computers in the expanded children's area in the newly remodeled Squirrel Hill Branch of the Carnegie Library. Click photo for larger image.

Sitting on the bench, you're thrust into the architecturally and ethnically diverse heart of the city, overlooking the great fluted, Ionic columns of the Classical Revival PNC Bank, the Cage's black Carrara glass facade, the rugged stone Gothic Sixth Presbyterian Church and the condominiums that wrap around it, the ho-hum new corner building housing Rite Aid, the vibrant Jewish Community Center, the traffic lights, the cars coming and going, the old gent with the cane, the mother and daughter coming out of the newsstand -- all of these are now gathered in the library's embrace and part of its "borrowed landscape," to borrow a gardener's phrase. The glass walls extend the library's reach into the community and into the past.

And as you move around inside the library, Lubetz said, "you can see almost everywhere, so you feel connected with people even though you're not sitting next to them."

Heightening the social experience has been a goal of all the library renovations, giving readers a reason to leave the house when the world comes to them at the click of a mouse.

Community meetings showed the neighborhood wanted a larger children's room, a teen area, more computers and a usable terrace that could be locked at night to thwart vandalism. All of this and more was achieved in the makeover, which provides 7,000 additional square feet, an upgraded collection, meeting rooms and a new Namm Business Center, a satellite library funded by a bequest from patron and podiatrist Allen Namm.

The unfinished loft look created by exposed beams, pipes and ductwork, plywood and resin partitions, movable furniture and flexible space is a good match for this educated, cosmopolitan neighborhood, and it's meant to suggest the library is a friendly space.

To warm up the neutral palette, the Lubetz team used, mostly sparingly, colorful wall paint, carpet and other materials, including sea-blue, translucent Panelite, which looks like flattened-out honeycombs of resin. This organic-looking, shadow-inducing material is as gorgeous as plastic gets.

Many of the materials have recycled content, which combine with abundant natural light and other sustainable and nontoxic features designed to achieve LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

Just inside the entrance is a two-story space meant to recall the great reading rooms of yesteryear. It's created by the copper-clad box that rises up behind the glass walls; from the interior, it's like looking up inside a mansard roof. The inside of the box is covered with copper mesh, ordinarily used for insect screens but here obscuring the acoustic insulation that is tucked away throughout the library. Looking like it's barely tacked in place, it turns the space into a giant tent.

Changing perceptions

A walk through the library -- pick your own path -- finds the scale soon shifting from grand to room-size to cozy nooks. Stacks are imaginatively used not just to hold books but to create the walls of small rooms where tables invite reading or study. Along Murray Avenue, four window boxes that project out of the building are intimate spaces where one or two good friends can climb up and curl up with a good book. They're slyly canted to frame only views of the church, and like the library's big glass box at the corner, they glow at night.

The new terrace, entered from Murray Avenue, is all fresh, green, inviting grass up to the library doors. But without pavers or pavement, it's a mudhole in the making -- or will librarians just have to lock those doors on rainy days?

And for all the smart, sleek, sexy, contemporary chairs, only two are the sort of sturdy arm chairs the elderly may feel comfortable getting into (and out of). Lubetz says a few more are on the way, but will they be enough?

The elevator won't be operating until early next month, but there's another ramped, rear entrance off Marlborough Street, which leads to doors that, like those on Forbes, are stenciled with quotations chosen by librarians.

"When I got my library card, that was when my life began," Rita Mae Brown said.

On Tuesday night, the grand opening drew almost 4,000 people snaking up Forbes Avenue. It may not be too big a stretch to say, some day, that when Squirrel Hill got this lofty library, its life began anew.