Literary executor.

This Australian library is an exploration of native cultivated timber used in new ways to minimise waste and manipulate light to create a community focus.

Eltham in Victoria has for long had a sense of pride as a community aware of art and ecology alike; it was, for instance, one of the first places where mud bricks were used in recent times. So Greg Burgess was an entirely appropriate choice of architect for the new Eltham library, which is intended to be a focus for the cultural life of the whole community. In a long progression of work of which the most celebrated recent building is the national park cultural centre at Ayers Rock (AR November 1996), Burgess has shown great sensitivity to both local community and natural environment.

Adjacent to historic Shillinglaw Cottage and Eltham Common, the library site is a precious one, containing several fine oaks, eucalypts, yellow box and pepper trees which it was necessary to preserve. Such factors were important in determining the perimeter of the plan, and the section was partly generated from the necessity of building on a platform to avoid floods which occasionally (once in 100 years) rise to 2m above ground - one result is an elaborate and rewarding ramped route to the centre of the building, officially for the disabled, but a pleasure for anyone to use.

Another generator of the basic form was the role of the librarians. In a squashed doughnut plan, Burgess has conflated the notion of librarian as guardian of a Benthamite panopticon, observing the whole organisation from a central position, with that of the librarian as gatekeeper, carefully monitoring users going in and out. The real brilliance is that these moves (essentially ones of control, and used to emphasise that function in thousands of libraries all over the world) do not make the place seem authoritarian or bureaucratic. The section, with its continuous concentric clerestories and the radially organised plan, ensures that the volume is divided into a series of interconnected places. Light falls from the clerestories over ceilings which curve in section as well as plan, generating cave-like spaces which enjoy a good deal of daylight, diffused without glare, and are largely free of destructive direct light.

The curved ceilings are clad in warm bevel-edge boards of plantation-grown Victorian mountain ash (Eltham Shire Council refuses to allow rainforest timber to be used in its buildings); the boards are made by cutting radially sawn wedges into flat slices. Burgess is something of a prophet of radial sawing, which he uses whenever possible (see AR November 1996). He points out that, compared to conventional methods of turning logs into planks, radial sawing gives better yields and produces much more stable sections. Wedge-shaped sections which result from radial sawing are stable, with consistent growth ring orientation, and they shrink evenly; boards made out of the wedges are not stable, but cup in the same direction on drying, so they can be arranged consistently. In the ceilings, wood was used unseasoned to achieve the curves more easily. The planks were backed by acoustic blankets, so as they have shrunk, revealing consistent gaps, the ceilings have become more visually striated and acoustically absorptive.

Radially sawn hardwood is used extensively elsewhere in the building. Horizontal timber cladding is usually made of drop segment sections, where grooves are cut into the wide end of a wedge to receive the thin edge of the wedge below. Balusters, balustrades and handrails are wedge shaped, and vertical boards are cut in the same way as the ceiling timbers. Other materials include ordinary bricks up to platform height with, in places, mud bricks above that, sheltered from Victoria's frequent rain by the wide eaves which form the verandahs. Openings in the mud brick are formed using recycled timber, as are the verandah posts. Natural timber poles with their bark stripped off form vertical elements of structure in ceremonial places, for instance in the foyer and round the central circulation desk.

But the structure is far from being as simple and rustic as it seems on first sight, for it also contains vertical universal beams and curved steels to provide the shapes of the ceilings. Wooden joists connect the roof steels, and in other places composite timber and ply l-beams are used. Purists will doubtless be upset by this medley of materials and forms, much of it concealed, but it is difficult to imagine how the volumes could have been economically created without using such a system. The rest of us forgive the lack of structural consistency, for it enables the creation of spaces delicately infused with light, and sensitive in their understanding of the nature of timber and its uses in place-creation.