The Hayward Library is a win-win for a Northern California city and its residents

The Hayward Library, in Hayward, Calif., has always gone above and beyond to provide support to the community it serves—a hands-on homework help program, an adult literacy program, and parent education are just a few of the library’s offerings. An outdated building with a scattershot design, however, was making the fulfillment of this mission difficult. 

“It was too small and didn’t even come close to meeting the needs of this big city,” says Christopher Noll, FAIA, principal at Noll & Tam Architects.

When the updated Hayward Library & Community Learning Center was named as one of AIA’s COTE® Top Ten Award winners in 2024, it was the culmination of almost 16 years of work on the part of the city, its residents, and project leads Noll & Tam Architects. The state-of-the-art library has also come to represent a larger revitalization of the city's downtown, becoming a civic center point in a city that's in the process of designing its future. 

Through thoughtful design, careful consideration of sustainability solutions, and round after round of community engagement, Hayward finally has a public library its residents can be proud of. 

"A win-win situation" 

Hayward Library’s longstanding status as a community meeting place and hub required input from teens, parents, librarians, and other city residents during the design phase.

“There was a huge amount of community interest in it,” Noll says. “People were really engaged.” The Friends of the Library group was particularly hands-on—in fact, without the group's support and mobilization around the initial bond measure that funded the project, it is doubtful it would have come to fruition at all. Noll & Tam also solicited the input of teen patrons of the library through a process called YODA, or the Youth Opportunity Design Approach. 

In addition to the high-priority community spaces, the city asked that the new building be highly energy efficient. The design team encouraged the city to go beyond the levels of LEED certification to create a net zero-energy building that would produce more electricity than it consumed annually. 

Subsequently, the design team had to give careful consideration to how the three-story building would save energy to achieve its net-zero goals. There wasn’t enough room on the library’s roof alone to place the necessary solar panels, so the roof of the adjacent parking garage provided additional space while also shading the garage's top level. 

The completed building represents an impressive benchmark: it's the largest net zero-energy public library in the nation, inspiring Hayward to require that all subsequent new city buildings also meet the same standard. Natural daylighting and radiant heated/cooled floors throughout all levels also help to reduce energy consumption cost and boost the building's performance. Auto-shade window technology, reacting to temperature, weather, and other variables, also provide an assist in meeting those goals. Locally-sourced materials helped to reduce the building's overall carbon footprint. 

Crucially, a key characteristic of the design for the new library moved its location from the center of a civic park to a former parking lot across the street, which also situated it closer to existing public parking.

“We did the math and we said, ‘Well, we can fit the library on this urban parcel and then free up the entire park to be the signature central plaza for the city of Hayward,'” Noll says. “It was a win-win situation.”

Trina Goodwin, associate principal at Noll & Tam, explains that the choice to move the library out of the park to a tighter, more urban site drove the architecture and layout of the building. 

“It became this tight cube,” she says. “We had to be really strategic about how to bring light in, because it was a pretty dense building.”

Creative solutions

After a community meeting during the design process, the Noll & Tam team came up with a creative solution to store more than 200,000 gallons of rainwater for the city annually. The original library building had a basement, formerly the location of staff offices—an anomaly for California. 

“Having a basement in a building in California is a little odd, right? There are not a lot of basements in buildings. An idea is thrown out [at the meeting] that, hey, there’s an element here that we could re-use in an interesting way,” says Scott Salge, AIA, of Noll & Tam. "The fire department [was] really supportive of the idea." By waterproofing the former basement and turning it into a cistern, the design team was able to engineer a solution that uses the captured water for 100% of the non-potable fixtures in the library, including toilets and landscaping. An initial discussion of the plan during a California drought underscored the impact of the solution. 

The library is located roughly 100 feet away from the Hayward Fault Zone, and seismic activity was at the forefront of the design concept. 

"It's just waiting to go," says Noll of the fault line. "We don't know when, but when it does go, it's going to be a big one. The building is built really strongly to withstand this. It's a lot of concrete, a lot of rebar. From a resiliency point of view, the building is designed to withstand a really big earthquake, but it's not a [Community Resilience Hub]." However, an emergency generator can keep critical systems running in the event of a power outage, including a Wi-Fi router for community members to access. 

"On the cutting edge of what a city can do" 

Hayward is, by many standards, a modest, middle-class city, but its clear vision for the future can serve as a model for other communities in a similar position. The new library is just the first facet of Hayward's forward-thinking Climate Action Plan, which offers a comprehensive vision for carbon neutrality by 2045. 

"They're kind of an extraordinary city in that way," says Noll. "When we started this project, they described themselves as an ordinary, blue-collar city. They said, 'We don't want a Cadillac, just give us a Chevy. That's what we need and deserve.' In the end, we said, 'We didn't give you a Cadillac, we gave you a Tesla.' And that's how they see themselves now: they're very out there, on the cutting edge, of what [a] city can do.'" 

Katherine Flynn is Director, Digital Content at AIA.