The Toowong Municipal Library Building is heritage-listed former public library at 579–583 Coronation Drive, Toowong, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by James Birrell and built in 1961 by Stuart Brothers. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 28 August 1998. In 2001, the library moved to Toowong Village Shopping Centre and the original building has been used as business premises.
History
The former Toowong Municipal Library is prominently located on Coronation Drive and was opened in April 1961, built to the design of Chief Architect at the Brisbane City Council, James Birrell. It provides evidence of the City Council's expansion of public facilities in the post war period.
Following World War II, when shortage of both labour and materials restricted building work to essentials, the Brisbane City Council embarked on a capital works programme which provided the city with a substantial number of upgraded and new recreational and educational facilities. During the period from 1945 to the early 1960s about ten libraries were constructed and two renovated and redevelopment and construction occurred at five major pool complexes. From the period 1955 until 1960, when most of this vast programme was realised, the Chief Architect with the Brisbane City Council was James Birrell. He was responsible for the design of about 150 sites ranging from his two major projects – the Centenary Pool Complex and the Wickham Terrace Car Park to a number of bus shelters, park entrances, public toilets, cemeteries, sewerage depots and a bus depot. Included in his work of this time was the redevelopment of the Toowong Baths and the construction of a major municipal library at Toowong.
Birrell graduated from architecture at the University of Melbourne in 1951, where he was much influenced by one of his teachers, Melbourne architect Roy Grounds. It was Grounds' use of strong primary forms which influenced Birrell's early work, including that work for the Brisbane City Council. Like Grounds, Birrell used highly identifiable forms sited in landscapes which, apart from a reality associated with their function have an abstract reality or quality which relies solely on their form and siting. The Toowong Library characterises this aspect of his work.
The library is a twelve-sided figure where the geometry is made more insistent by the walls sloping outward with diagonal external framing. The derivation of the library's form can be explained by book-shelving arrangements and its ring-beam construction, but if it has any meaning in itself this is in having the appearance of a flying-saucer and being easily identifiable at on a busy road.
In 1952, Birrell expressed aspects of his architectural philosophy in the Melbourne journal Architecture and the Arts, with which he was much involved. These ideas are manifest in many of his Queensland buildings, including those constructed for the Brisbane City Council. This philosophy described the primacy of material and structural integrity, advocating a new engineering dynamism imbued by the materials, technical knowledge and industrial procedures of contemporary culture. This is certainly one of the enduring forces in his work. Following World War II rapid progress was made in the technology of building materials, particularly in the Brisbane steelworks industry. The new and developed materials and products which Birrell used frequently include acrylics and plastics; concrete screen blocks; and timber based boards significantly plywood. Using expertise gained during the war years, Evans Deakin, local ship builders were instrumental in solving complex geometrics in steel work often required on the projects of Birrell.