10.07.2012 / Arts & Culture
A culture supermarket
Every cloud has a silver lining. This may be the moral of the story that we want to tell you about today, a story that takes place in McAllen, a 150,000 inhabitants South Texas border town. Some time ago, McAllen’s local Walmart supermarket – a 2 1/2 football-field sized property – shut down and was abandoned by the retailer.
This huge ecomonster might have been left to rot for years had not the city decided to buy it and to subsequently invest as much as $26 million dollars in a renovation project.
The winning idea was to turn the former supermarket into a library, thus offering to historic McAllen Library a brand new location. The project was led by the Minneapolis-based firm
MS&R Architecture, and it certainly didn’t go unnoticed: the library won the 2012 top award for library interior design by the American Library Association and the International Interior Design Association.
The main challenge was to deal with such a wide space, and the architects managed to do it by stripping out much of the old ceiling and walls and by adding a touch of brighter colours, wood and catchy graphics to help visitors find their bearings through the huge building.
Services include conference rooms, a coffee shop, a copy center, an acoustically-shielded space for chatty teenagers, and a 64-terminal computer lab where users can surf the Web for free.
Definitely a brilliant idea.
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