Geelong Library and Heritage Centre

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RESEARCH BACKGROUND: The Geelong Library and Heritage Centre is a $45-million, eight-level building designed by Ashton Raggatt McDougall (ARM). The futuristic dome-like structure of building is exemplary of the radical architecture of ARM, which has received numerous significant awards. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: Through this project, ARM aimed to celebrate the tradition of great libraries, create an ambitious, future-oriented building, and design an organic structure that lets the natural world penetrate the interior. The building inhabits both the past and the future. Its form pays homage to the ideals of self-improvement, knowledge and curiosity expressed in the domes of great reading rooms such as the State Library of Victoria. It also recalls an era of great civic gestures of the 19th century - a time when domes on public buildings represented democracy, enlightenment and the arrival of civil society. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: The project won Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture at the 2016 Australian Institute of Architects (AIA) National Awards. At the 2016 AIA VIC Chapter Awards, it won the William Wardell Award for Public Architecture; the Marion Mahony Award for Interior Architecture; the Victorian Architecture Medal; and the Regional Prize. Jury Chair Hamish Lyon stated that the building has 'elevated the role of public architecture for both Geelong and the wider regional community.' It was critically reviewed in Architecture Australia, The Design Files, The Age, and Architecture and Design. This project demonstrates the significance of ARM's practice which, in 2016, was awarded the Gold Medal - the highest award of the AIA to recognise distinguished service by Australian architects. According to Naomi Stead, few practices in the country could claim such a commitment to ideas in architecture - to speculation and proposition, to criticism and argument, to a swarming multitude of concepts in every design.