Five projects have been named as winners of the AIA/ALA’s 2021 Library Building Awards, the organizations announced jointly on Wednesday.

Led by the new Valente Library in Cambridge, the quintet of honorees highlights a mix of both new building and renovation characterized by an incorporation of social practice that has dominated library building in recent years.

The William Rawn Associates-designed building opened in 2019 and features a bocce court and inviting glazed facade that anchors a crescent-shaped plaza in the heart of the city’s diverse Inman Square neighborhood. Its focus as a community center that provides on-site conference rooms, strong Wi-Fi, and expanded shelf space is made possible thanks to the new 10,000-square-foot branch, which is nearly twice the size of its predecessor. 

Another Boston-area project is the 2020 renovation of the BPL’s Roxbury Branch location, previously occupied by a brutalist structure built in 1978 by local firm Kallmann and McKinnell, one of the firms that helped design Boston’s polarizing City Hall.

With a price tag of $14.7 Million, the new library reimagines the space as an accessible and engaging civic-oriented structure thanks in part to a 2013 programming study that guided Utile’s vision for the library, ultimately yielding a glass curtain wall, open staircase, and an improved signage and front entrance in step with Roxbury’s renamed Nubian Square neighborhood. 

Other winners of this year’s award include a “reinvention” of Arizona State’s original 1966 Hayden Library by Ayers Saint Gross, a mixed-use development in Chicago’s Little Italy neighborhood that brought together the city’s Housing Authority and Public Library entities for the first time with the help of SOM, and a new temporary home for the Sunset Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, which commissioned a Leroy Street Studio-led refurbishment of an unused courthouse building from 1931 to further aid in the progressive revitalization of the neighborhood plagued recently by gentrification and pandemic-related social issues. 

Each building has to demonstrate a sense of “place, purpose, ecology, environmental sustainability, and of history,” according to the AIA website. 

The six-member jury panel will meet again next year to name winners of the competition’s fifth edition.