A canopy of imagination at the Maple public library

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“I must be growing small again,” said Alice. “[A]nd now for the garden!” and she ran with all speed back to the little door.

Except, imagine if that little door was a regular-sized door, and it opened into the sprawling Maple Community Centre at 10190 Keele St. north of Toronto. But then, once inside, an enormous leaf, one right out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland pointed to the newly-renovated Maple Library. If it were you standing there, would you drink the potion and go?

With new walls of glass showing the shelves of printed delights therein, you’d be a silly rabbit not to: “If you think about every retail store, that’s where they showcase their merchandise, so that’s what we wanted to do,” says Margie Singleton, CEO of Vaughan Public Libraries.

But one leaf is not enough. Come closer and you’ll find this library branch is a forested wonderland, thanks to ATA Architects Inc., and that one must enter through a gnarly portal of green, where leaves become windows! So, how does one build big, silly leaves that make full-sized people feel like Lilliputians?

“The catenary is not an organic shape,” begins architect Mark Driedger (“Coulda fooled me,” said the Caterpillar). “It’s using straight [steel] studs that come down – the only part that’s curved is the centre spine … so then the drywall goes on, and it’s six-millimeter drywall so it can curve around.”

The magic, he continues, comes from the graphics, which his wife, Alina Pisetskaya, created. First, she created lines with drop shadows so they “pop out” and direct the eye; next, she found an extreme close-up image of leaf veining; and, lastly, to “create different shading patterns and make it more contrast-y,” Ms. Pisetskaya used “very high-resolution pictures of the moon … and that’s put in the very background,” says the proud husband. The moon? Why not?

To replace sunlight from windows lost when the branch itself shrank during renovations – they lost about 35 per cent of their space to other community uses – ATA installed clusters of lights that illuminate the shiny leaves and the white-painted ceiling.

Look up and you’ll also spy a stem that wends its way around HVAC and sound baffles and all sorts of complicated ceiling stuff. The stem, eventually, leads to a glassed-in quiet room with a big leaf for a ceiling. And let’s not forget another giant leaf, right at the front, that defines the children’s area; here, a curving couch wiggles its way over to Corian-capped desks that scoop down to create “kid traps,” laughs Mr. Driedger. The couch, by the way, sits away from the glass wall but meets a solid wall on both ends; this creates another kid trap that parents now use (just place the little one down there with a toy or a picture book).

“Story times happen here,” Ms. Singleton says of the area with the couch. Traditionally, she says, these kinds of louder activities were placed in a quiet room “behind a closed door, which, A, is not welcoming, and B, people don’t even know it’s going on.”

Then again, much of what Vaughan Public Libraries is doing nowadays bucks tradition. Some of the stacks are on wheels. Little, retail-like merchandising stands let patrons reach for librarian-curated things since, as Ms. Singleton points out, “a display is something you look at but you don’t touch, and merchandise is something you take.” And, throughout, a slat-wall system allows books to ‘float’ against the walls and look as tantalizing as a bag of cookies in the grocery store. And the main desk – where the scary librarians sit – has been moved to the middle of the space, so that a person who wanders in doesn’t feel immediately watched.

To continue the organic theme, Ms. Pisetskaya also created a weaving, wavy wallpaper pattern that ‘grows’ up the walls. And speaking of things growing, the outdoor Reading Garden – where a child might encounter an actual caterpillar or butterfly while reading a book – is another space where giant leaf-forms provide shelter.

“VPL pushed for something special in this area,” begins Mr. Driedger. When he showed them a “typical” trellis, they rejected it. So, ATA used metal hoops that would resemble leaves once the wooden, chevron-shaped bits were installed. “I come from Leamington, Ont., which is greenhouse [central]; my first job was carrying greenhouse hoops and hauling them up to these grown men, and they’d be in tangles when we’d get them from the manufacturer.”

When lit up at night, the Reading Garden creates quite a beacon for Keele Street traffic; this is good, since the library is just one small part of the community centre complex – built in sections from 1970 to the early part of this century – which contains a pool, a bowling alley, bocce ball courts, an ice rink, and squash courts. The Reading Garden won a Vaughan Urban Design Award of Merit in January, 2023.

Eventually, says Michael Biljetina (the other principal at ATA), the library will reach the sidewalk when the Tech Hub and Digital Literacy Lab is built. “We just finished a 979-page report that is going to be presented to city council next month,” he says. “It takes the entire 170,000 square feet and looks at the master planning over the next 30 years, right from design all the way through sustainability and net-zero. How do we bring the entire community centre [into the future] without skipping a beat and keeping it open?”

Big thinking often achieves big results. And, in the meantime, the denizens of Vaughan can read, nap, and dream under an enormous, green canopy of imagination.