San Diego Central Library
Nine-story landmark with a rooftop garden, café and reading room beneath a latticed steel dome.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the San Diego Central Library traces a comment made in a design workshop, long before ground broke, that architect Rob Wellington Quigley says shaped the entire building: that restaurant and garden views should not belong only to those who could pay for them. You'll hear how that idea decided the library's rooftop garden, its shaded reading room, and the deliberately unfinished dome over the rare book room below. It follows decades of stalled plans dating back to the early nineteen seventies before the design finally took shape.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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