A civic building that only gets visited on special occasions has, in a real sense, failed at its job. The brief for this library was explicit about wanting daily use, not just an impressive opening week.
That shaped concrete decisions: reading rooms open directly onto a public courtyard rather than being tucked behind a formal lobby.
A year after handover, that's the metric that actually mattered — not how the building photographed at launch, but whether people kept coming back on an ordinary Tuesday.