Mark Lamster writes for Architectural Record: ‘The new Adams Street Branch of the Boston Public Library, which opened last summer in the working-class municipality of Dorchester, is pleasing (if a bit of an odd duck), a work of inventive geometries that fits neatly into its low-rise context. The library’s quirky form was the product of a lengthy community-design process, one that forced the architects, Boston-based NADAAA, to rethink its original proposal for the building. The stumbling block was a large oak tree at the north end of the site, which runs along Adams Street, Dorchester’s primary commercial strip. The Boston Public Library wanted it removed, to create a tabula rasa for the new building, and the architects followed that directive. The community, however, desired the tree to stay put, and made that clear in no uncertain terms. In turn, NADAAA founding principal, Nader Tehrani, embraced this “productive friction,” as he calls it, redrawing the plan with the tree as a focal point.’
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