Harold Washington Library
- Architect
- Hammond, Beeby and Babka
- Style
- Postmodernism
- City
- Chicago, IL
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The Harold Washington Library Center is the central library of the Chicago Public Library system, opened in 1991 at 400 South State Street after more than a decade without a proper central library. Designed by Hammond, Beeby and Babka in a postmodern idiom, it replaced the city's 19th-century central library and is named for the mayor who pushed the project through.
the building
Scale of the building. The library holds roughly 756,000 square feet of work space, growing to about 972,000 square feet once the rooftop winter-garden event space is counted in.
the style
Hammond, Beeby and Babka designed the library in a postmodernist idiom, a deliberate departure from the glass-box modernism that had defined the Loop's civic and commercial buildings for decades.
More on Postmodernismsignificance
The building's construction followed a long, funding-starved 1980s debate that began after Chicago's old central library was converted into the Chicago Cultural Center in 1977 and its collection was put into storage. Mayor Harold Washington, elected in 1983, championed the new library, which now bears his name.
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