Some 20 kilometres southwest of Cologne, the town of Brühl is a compact, almost inconspicuous presence just west of the Rhine River. Notable for a neighbouring nature preserve and its quaint historic centre, the community of 50,000 is now also home to an understated architectural jewel, the recently renovated — and re-imagined — Brühl City Hall and Library. In the heart of the city, the civic complex combines a meticulously restored government building with a contemporary wing that’s home to the town’s welcoming new central library.
Designed by Cologne-based architecture firm JSWD, the 5,200-square-metre complex deftly fuses a 19th century neoclassical corner building (with baroque revival flourishes) and a contemporary yet contextual addition.
Housing Brühl’s city council chambers and various municipal offices, the handsome stucco building has been carefully renovated with an emphasis on accessibility and energy efficiency. While the design carved out more open — and barrier-free — circulation, the interior’s ornamentation and historic integrity has largely been preserved.
Sitting alongside the restored four-storey city hall, JSWD’s new public library seamlessly extends the street wall to the west, where the expanded complex opens onto a small civic square. Replacing a previous 1960s addition, the buff brick library picks up on its older neighbour’s scale and rhythm of window fenestration while introducing a distinctly contemporary architectural language of sharp, confident lines.
And while the link between old and new is subtle and deferential to history, the library meets the civic square with a more assertive modern face. Here, the building is elegantly staggered into a trio of house-form volumes, each capped with a prominent peak roof.
The play of angles is paired with a series of striking perforated brick facades. The double skin fosters a sense of depth and tactility — also reducing solar heat gain — while rows of windows behind the bricks add an additional sense of texture to the otherwise pared-down architectural form.
Inside, the library features a dedicated lower level children’s area — which opens out to a compact and tranquil inner courtyard reading room — topped by three airy, light-filled levels.
The best of the bunch is the top floor, where the building’s extruded dormers create cozy window reading nooks, beneath a striking sawtooth ceiling that translates the trio of angular roofs into a dynamic indoor setting. In Brühl and some ways beyond, there’s no better place to crack open a book and get reading.
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