Why this Austin suburb made a library the centerpiece of its new downtown
When the new library in Cedar Park, Texas, opened its doors last month, it made a splashy entrance. Designed by award-winning architectural firm Lake Flato, it’s meant to exemplify the ways a library can be a diverse, equitable public good.
The backyard includes a new playground by Danish designer Monstrum, featuring plays paces shaped like giant wooden birds. The ground floor boasts a maker space, community rooms, and a massive wall that mimics a bookshelf, to buffer activity areas from quiet reading rooms. There’s even a mechanical sorter built into one wall, which allows patrons to watch books circulate around the new building.
“We’re a town of 83,000, and during the first week the library was open, we had close to 30,000 visitors,” says Brenda Eivens, Cedar Park’s city manager since 2006. “That has continued into the second and third week, so we know this is a great amenity for the city.”
But what may be most noteworthy about the new building is the larger role it’s meant to play. Designed to be a community gathering space, it’s the first piece of the forthcoming Bell District, which will open in phases over the next decade. The developers behind the 50-acre neighborhood planned for the 47,000-square-foot library and surrounding park to open first, as a means to create a sense of place that would draw residents to the area as housing, stores, office space, and dining venues slowly get added.
“The idea was, can a library be an anchor?” says Rob Shands, partner with RedLeaf Properties, the developer on the project. “It’s certainly not a traditional anchor. But the more we explored it with the city, the more we got into what their vision was for this library, we were totally blown away.”
This concept of placemaking isn’t new; development across the country tends to use parks, or sports stadiums, as anchors for real estate. Just look at the massive appreciation in value that occurred in Manhattan around the High Line elevated park, or the billion-dollar development vision around the new Texas Rangers stadium in Arlington.
Utilizing a library as the magnet for a larger real estate investment adds a new public gathering space that isn’t owned or managed by a private developer. In many cases, new stadiums and sports facilities get public subsidies. But the city was going to invest in this public good anyway. In this case, the developer basically gets a project centerpiece for free.
The main lobby, a double-height space with glass walls and terrazzo floors, is designed to invite the public inside, says Ashley Grzywa, architect at Lake Flato and director of the library project. The exterior is meant to be “a building that has no backside,” she says, equally welcoming for those entering from the street or biking from a trail in the park. One side—which contains an indoor event space and covered porch area for private functions—faces a public lawn overseen by the developer that’s across the street from future retail and restaurants, while another faces an adjacent riverfront park.
“This is going to be a site where people come to the library and then happen to wander into a shop or a restaurant, and that sort of catalyst for inclusiveness for the site was really important,” says Grzywa. “Because if retail and shopping had come first, that limits the extent people feel comfortable showing up.”
The development has been in the works for more than a decade; the public-private partnership between the city and RedLeaf was signed in 2020, two weeks before COVID-19 shutdowns. Incorporated 50 years ago, Cedar Park has long been a bedroom community of Austin, lacking a real downtown core. The Bell District project seeks to change that, turning a four-lane commercial roadway, Bell Boulevard, into a town center and gathering place.
“You could have an arena, but a library brings people seven days a week,” Eivens says. “People love our library and the programming, and the chance to expand that really benefited both sides of the equation, helping the city with more public gathering and helping the development by enhancing the experience and setting itself.”
Building the library first, creating what developers have labeled Cedar Park’s front porch, aims to add a multigenerational public space in the (new) heart of downtown. Eivens says the design includes features like play spaces and giant light pegboards, as well as outdoor reading porches and gathering spots. There’s a series of pop-out bay windows where adults can sit and watch their children play in the courtyard as the sun sets over the hillside. If you’re a developer trying to lure families downtown, or create a shopping district where parents can easily take kids on an errand, promoting this kind of space makes a lot of sense.
“This is a back-to-basics, community-coming-together public facility,” says Shands. “A library wasn’t a place I would have usually thought I’d want to visit on a Saturday morning, but this is such a cool facility, from an architectural standpoint and its approach to programming for the community.”
Cedar Park isn’t the only recent example of a library becoming integral to a larger development or being seen as a community anchor for adjoining neighborhoods. The Nashville Public Library’s Donelson Branch, which opened in June, is meant to revitalize a historic neighborhood. The new public library in Rockford, Illinois, which opened its doors this past summer on the shore of the Rock River, is part of the city’s efforts to reenergize its downtown. And Omaha, Nebraska’s forthcoming central library, set to open in 2026, is being moved to a central part of the city, at the nexus of different transit lines, where protests and community organizations take place.
In Birmingham, Alabama, a $50 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development is being used to redevelop the Smithfield neighborhood library, creating a mixed-use social innovation center integrated with a housing complex—one of the latest examples of developers combining housing and libraries.
And these likely won’t be the last. Shands says the foot traffic so far at Cedar Park is well beyond what he expected, and the farmers market held next to the library has become a big draw. In 2025, when ground breaks on the district’s next phase, which will eventually include 1,500 apartments, 250,000 square feet of office space, and 80,000 square feet of retail, it’ll be an established destination. Shands says he’s already getting inquiries from chefs who are looking at potential restaurant leases and wondering whether they could hold classes or events at the library.
Even before the rest of the Bell District gets built, Shands wants to see where else this idea can be utilized. He believes anchoring the next new neighborhood around an active library isn’t just a good idea, but that it’s very scalable. He muses, “We’re sitting here thinking, Why hasn’t this been done before?”
Fast Company
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