Libraries : SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : A Building Famous Yet Unpretentious

It has a familiar look but with a twist, said a visitor from Inglewood after her first look recently at the pastel-colored San Juan Capistrano Regional Library.

“It’s a mission style but different, maybe a New Mexico mission style,” said Marie Calamaria, standing outside the 7-year-old building.

Comparisons to the mission that gave this community its name come automatically, partly because the library is on historic El Camino Real downtown, just a block from Mission San Juan Capistrano and across Acjachema Street from the mission’s parish church.

Except for the red tile roofs and stucco, not much of the library resembles the Spanish Colonial motif so prevalent in this city. Instead, world-reknowned architect Michael Graves of Princeton University designed a 26,000-square-foot complex of turrets, mini-towers, columns, Art Deco fixtures and odd-shaped windows, with a courtyard surrounded by nooks and crannies.

It is an award-winning blend of architectural themes that, in the words of design writer Sam Hall Kaplan, “gave a polite nod to the adjacent mission but did not bow to it.”

That relationship with the mission was a major part of the design selection, said Pamela Gibson, a San Juan Capistrano resident and member of the advisory committee that chose Graves’ work after a much-publicized architecture competition that drew 43 responses from firms around the world.

“It had to be a building,” Gibson said, “that was strong enough to hold its own on the opposite corner from the mission. . . . To be perfectly honest, the building terrified me at the time. It was so different, yet it had real power.”

Because of that power, the library is a building that people generally feel strongly about, Gibson said.

“A lot of people hate it,” she said. “It’s one of those buildings that people don’t feel in between about. They like it or hate it.”

Another first-time visitor to the library, Colleen Goodill of Laguna Beach, placed herself among those who love Graves’ building.

“There’s so much play going on in the design, especially inside,” said Goodill, a designer and transplanted New Yorker who has been in California just three months. “The shapes of the rooms are so much fun. I think it’s a privilege to use this library.”

Librarian Jose A. Aponte, who has worked in libraries for 15 years, called it a “delightful place to work.”

“This building motivates the staff to be interactive,” Aponte said. “It has so many twists and turns that we can’t just direct people around.”