When the Anythink Nature Library opened in Thornton this August, it didn’t simply add another branch to Adams County’s library system. It introduced a new kind of public space, one designed to bring people closer to the natural world. More than 10,500 visitors stepped inside the 33,000-square-foot facility during its first two days.
From the outside, the architecture takes its cues from the surrounding 140-acre Aylor Open Lands. Designed in collaboration with Davis Partnership Architects, GH Phipps, Anythink staff, and the Nature Library Indigenous Advisory Council, the building’s form draws directly from the terrain.
“The inspiration for the Nature Library was the land itself,” says executive director Mark Fink. “Aylor Open Lands offers expansive views and a windswept landscape covered in native prairie grasses. This informed the design for the building. From an aerial view, the building is meant to be three blades of grass blowing in the wind.”
At the entrance, an abstract feature column sets the tone. Depending on who’s looking, it might resemble a native cottonwood tree, a vortex, the tree of life, or even the Anythink logo.
Inside, the library is organized around what Anythink calls its “environmental kinship model,” with four sensory zones surrounding the open-air Kinship Garden. About Nature is a light-filled sunroom designed for quiet study, with biology and ecology collections close at hand. In Nature gets considerably more playful, with an indoor boulder field and access to an outdoor mud pit. With Nature slows things down again, pairing fiction and poetry with an Indigenous Knowledge collection shaped by the library’s advisory council. Finally, For Nature offers a low-sensory circular room beneath a starry ceiling, where meditation, sound baths, and stewardship programming take place.
The idea extends well beyond books. The library’s “TryIts” collection lets visitors check out everything from snowshoes to bird-watching kits, wildlife cameras, and camping gear for up to three weeks. Step outside, and learning continues through nine demonstration gardens, an Art & Science Nature Lab, and a one-mile loop trail connecting directly to the surrounding open space.
“In short, the Nature Library concept transforms the library from a place that stores knowledge about nature into one structured to move every visitor . . . through the full arc of relationship—observing, touching, feeling connected to, and giving back to—the natural world,” Mark says.
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