Deconstructing Hargreaves: A Renovation of UC Library Square

Landscape Architecture & Community Planning – Implementation

Project Narrative

Library Square on the University of Cincinnati’s Uptown West Campus was an iconic cobblestone nautilus plaza designed by Hargreaves & Associates (1990’s) that had fallen into disrepair. The University required the redesign to respect the original design intent, while embracing emerging trends and student needs on the densely populated urban campus.

Historically, the existing 23,000 sf plaza was devoid of seating and amenities, and thus functioned strictly as a pass through for students. The design team evaluated the existing campus looking specifically at the circulation and materiality of the campus environment.

The “Library” for today’s student expands beyond the physical walls of a building and into the exterior campus environs. It is the spaces between the buildings that foster social interactions, embrace technology, enhance collaboration, create sense of place, and embody campus stewardship and sustainability. These design tenets that are incorporated into the Library Square renovation.

The iconic element of the original plaza was the cobblestone spiral. By deconstructing the Fibonacci spiral into its basic tangential elements, the designer used the emanating diagonals as the array of pathway centerlines that establish the parterre for the reimagined plaza. These routes are framed by raised planting terraces flanked with monolithic seat walls that provide vertical interest across the plaza. Bosques of native trees frame each terrace with a woodland garden on the ground plane that include varied shade perennials, ferns, and ephemerals. The design creates a series of outdoor rooms for gathering, reading, or relaxing between classes and provides visual connectivity across major thoroughfares that intersect on this busy crossroads of campus.

The plaza renovation dramatically increases the proportion of softscape to hardscape, providing comfortable gathering spaces for students and faculty and attracts new students to this reimagined heart of campus.