Straight-on daytime view across the road: whole front with portico, steps, both end pavilions and flanking wings under clear blue sky. Some banners on the columns; small site fencing at right.

State Library, Mitchell Building

Shakespeare Place, Sydney

Walter Liberty Vernon; centre by Cobden Parkes’s Government Architect’s Branch. 1906 to 1942. Sandstone.

Size
Two main floors on a podium. No height found, so the drawing is estimated
Material
Sandstone, marble mosaic floor, bronze doors
Status
State Heritage Register, 1999. A working state library

David Scott Mitchell’s gift of his Australiana collection is the reason this building exists. His condition was that the books be kept in a building of their own. The Public Library had no room, so Vernon’s branch drew a new wing, built from 1906 to 1910. The heritage listing says it is one of only two government cultural buildings in this style, the Art Gallery being the other.

It grew by stages, and what you see from Shakespeare Place is mostly its latest part. The Dixson Wing opened in 1929 to hold William Dixson’s paintings. Work on the central section, with its Ionic portico and a marble mosaic copy of Abel Tasman’s map on the vestibule floor, began in 1939. The library got “under one roof” in June 1942, a notable thing to achieve while other public works were being cut for the war. A last sandstone section went on in 1964.

It can still provoke. In 2014 proposed changes to the Mitchell Library drew a petition from more than 200 writers and academics, joined by more than 9,000 library users. The library responded with a restoration that effectively reversed the proposals.

The stone

A NSW Government history says that stone for the library came from new quarries in the eastern suburbs from the 1920s, as Pyrmont ran out. So its later parts come from a different place to Vernon’s first wing, whose quarry no source consulted names. The library’s website says the building is made from sandstone quarried from below, though no quarry record could be found.

Read about Sydney Sandstone

Sources

  1. State Library of New South Wales, Wikipedia (incorporates NSW State Heritage Inventory text)
  2. History of the Library, State Library of NSW
  3. David Scott Mitchell collection, State Library of NSW
  4. Mitchell Library building, Dictionary of Sydney