Karen Fairbanks Founding Partner, Marble Fairbanks Architects
Karen Fairbanks is a founding partner of the New York– and Atlantabased firm Marble Fairbanks, where she focuses on educational and cultural clients. She received her MA from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and is currently the Claire Tow professor of professional practice and chair of the architecture department at Barnard College. She founded the department, developed its curriculum, and expanded the faculty to offer
Board of Directors for the New York Chapter of the AIA; Claire Tow Professor and Chair, Barnard College; Fellow in Architecture, New York Foundation for the Arts AIA, LEED AP honors
More than 50 awards including the Oculus Award, Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation; Educator of the Year, AIA New York State; Distinguished Alumna Award, University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture; American Architecture Awards, The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Art and Design
liberal arts architecture studies to the wider Columbia community. Among Fairbanks’s outstanding projects is her 2013 expansion of the Glen Oaks Branch Library in Queens, New York. Her work there replaced an existing single-story facility with a three-level, 18,000-square-foot building—not only doubling the area of the previous structure but also earning it LEED certification. Features such as a reading garden accessed through the library and a landscaped plaza serving as a green roof above the adult reading room helped in attaining the latter. A two-story atrium illuminates the library’s below-grade level as do skylights that bring in natural light from the plaza above. A large picture window on the second floor allows for views into and out of the children’s area while presenting a civic identity to the community. On bright days, the word “search” appears above this window, moving across the glass surface as the sun sweeps across the sky, a detail that uniquely animates the building throughout the seasons. At street level, a delicate graphic pattern on the glass curtain wall displays the same word but translated into 30 languages spoken in Glen Oaks—such as Hindi, Spanish, and Urdu—celebrating the neighborhood’s rich diversity. PROJECT TEAM SCOTT MARBLE, ROBERT BOOTH, MALLORY SHURE, ERIC NG, ADAM MARCUS, KATIE SHIMA KEY CONSULTANTS BURO HAPPOLD CONSULTING ENGINEERS, PLUS GROUP, LANGAN ENGINEERING, RICHARD SHAVER ARCHITECTURAL LIGHTING, SCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY PORTRAIT: DOROTHY HONG; PROJECT: EDUARD HUEBER
marblefairbanks.com
116
INTERIOR DESIGN