By Lamar Anderson:

With an expansive glazed facade and warm wood ceilings that subtly reflect light, the Los Gatos Public Library emits a soft glow at all waking hours, but the best time to see it is at dusk. That’s when the lighting program switches on and slowly sends a wash of amber (or blue or purple) across a band of frosted-glass panels tucked at the base of the second-floor windows. The color change, which spreads from the center of the facade outward, takes about 40 minutes to complete and happens almost imperceptibly. It’s the kind of touch that helps the already lamplike library advertise itself as a beacon for this small, mountain-edged city south of San Francisco Bay. The stretch of glass that houses RGB color-changing LEDs was originally meant to be empty, a leftover space from the raised-floor ventilation and electrical system. “We were just going to put a blank thing there,” recalls Chris Noll, principal of the Berkeley, California-based firm Noll & Tam Architects. “And I went, ’Oh, I want to do something with that. Why don’t we have some fun?'”

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