Case Studies

Even in a digital world, the local library remains a powerful pillar of the community. This was the thought behind the Canyon Branch Library, a new public library that opened in January 2025.

Serving the western part of Boynton Beach, Florida, the facility belongs to the Palm Beach County Library System. The 33,000-square-foot facility broke ground in 2022. It contains 130,000 titles in both analog and digital media, along with a meeting room that can accommodate 300 people, ample children and teen spaces, a podcast studio and a maker space.

What visitors will notice first when approaching the new library, however, are the actual columns that hold up the canopy in front of the main entrance. Together, six of these columns became the canvas for, Brad J. Goldberg, who was selected from a pool of more than 70 professional artists from all over the world.

After a years-long process that included design, construction, permitting and installation, the result is Opening Minds, an insightful and striking display featuring a series of granite panels that comprise the six columns. Each panel helps portray the vast, diverse and inclusive nature of the public library in the form of titles, quotations, library categories and topics, interspersing traditional analog text with the ones and zeros of binary code that represent today’s abundant digital content.

These symbols were painstakingly sandblasted onto individual honed Carnelian® granite panels. There are 16 panels on each of the six columns, bringing the total to 96. The panels capture 492 pieces of text, many of which were contributed by librarians, staff and local community members. They also include text in 20 languages, inviting different members of the community to pause and feel a special connection with specific inscriptions throughout the artwork.

Goldberg has been a Coldspring collaborator for decades, so he knew right away that Coldspring would be the ideal partner for fabricating this art installation.

“I’ve worked with Coldspring for many years and we’ve done so many projects together that it seemed like a natural fit,” Goldberg said. “We have a deep mutual understanding of each other’s capabilities and what is needed to get the best results for the final work.”

The Carnelian granite was sourced from the quarry Coldspring owns and operates in Milbank, South Dakota. Inscribing each panel with the complex text and binary code was a slow, time-consuming process that required significant due diligence among the artist, the library, stakeholders, and the Coldspring team. Fabrication of the panels took five months.

“As stone is my primary medium, it made sense to use granite for this project because of its longevity, durability, low maintenance and most important of all, its beauty,” Goldberg said.

Installation was complex, given the fact that a single broken panel would set back the entire schedule. Each of the 96 panels had to be installed in a specific location on a specific column to maintain the visual continuity of the piece. Topics related to children, for example, are purposefully located at their eye level, toward the bottom of the columns. To this end, Coldspring devised a packing method to ensure the panels arrived safely and in a sequence that could be unpacked and an installed correctly.

The installer for the project was renowned masonry company Dee Brown Inc., based in Dallas, Texas, another longtime collaborator of both Goldberg and Coldspring. Dee Brown managed the installation flawlessly over the course of several weeks. To protect the newly installed artwork from the surrounding construction activity, it was enclosed in a special box for a year until the library’s completion.

The Canyon Branch Library team remains very pleased with the result, which as Goldberg affirms, represents a tapestry of information the public can explore slowly and methodically, much like the way they can explore the library’s collected works beyond the main entrance.

“It has been gratifying to get such a positive community response from this installation,” Goldberg said. “The combination of binary code with quotations from books means it represents the contents of the library, almost like a bibliography for the structure itself. It is getting people in exactly the mindset I intended. They’re asking questions, connecting with others, and wanting to further explore the analog and digital worlds within.”