CLEVELAND, Ohio - Three design teams unveiled competing proposals Thursday for a new Cleveland Public Library Martin Luther King Jr. Branch in University Circle that offered sharply contrasting visions of how to translate King's legacy into architectural form.

One evoked the "table of brotherhood" envisioned by King in his "I have a dream" speech. A second imagined the library as an extension of the public spaces outside, where the community could gather.

A third viewed the library as a place wrapped in colored glass patterns inspired by slave-era quilts that communicated coded messages about Underground Railroad routes and safehouses in their geometries.

The library staged two forums about the designs Thursday afternoon and evening - one for high school students and one for the general public - at the existing MLK Branch at 1962 Stokes Blvd.

The current branch will be replaced by the new, $10 million building around the corner on Euclid Avenue west of Stokes Blvd. as part of the upcoming Circle Square project, a roughly $300 million, four-block development planned by locally based Midwest Development Partners.

The competition specified that the new library would serve as the lower level of an apartment building that would rise above it, but one of the three proposals boldly rejected that idea and conceived of the library as a stand-alone building with the apartment set behind it.

"This is great," Felton Thomas Jr., director of the library said of the competition in general.

"For us, this is exactly what we hoped to get from a competition: three different visions of what the MLK Branch could be, all viable, all interesting."

The library's board will choose a winning design at its meeting May 22.

The Cleveland Foundation sponsored the competition with a $93,000 grant intended to raise the ante on the design. Each of the finalist teams received $20,000 to develop their concepts.

Their three designs encompassed differing views of the ideal 21st century urban library.

They also incorporated different ideas about how the library would house and celebrate the Anisfield-Wolf collection of books by winners of the annual literary award of the same name granted by the Cleveland Foundation to honor writing on race and equality.

The competing teams and their proposals are as follows:

SO-Il of Brooklyn, New York, with architect Jonathan Kurtz of Cleveland, proposed a library conceived as a giant table with a laptop bar wrapping its outer edge. The table, elevated above the library's entry level, would function as flexible platform for public events, but could also be subdivided by movable screens and furniture.

A grand staircase symbolizing the mountaintop evoked in King's most famous speech would rise from the north end of the table and would lead to a display area for the Anisfield-Wolf collection conceived as a sculptural "forest of ideas."

"We don't want architecture to be in your face," said Jing Liu of SO-IL, "we want architecture to make everything that happens in it [the library] to come alive."

Bialosky Architects of Cleveland with Vines Architecture of Raleigh, NC, envisioned their library as a glassy enclosure slid under the apartment tower above.

The apartments, in turn would be raised on columns one story higher than the library, creating an open-air roof terrace that would allow light to spill into the core of the library through a skylight.

The skylight would emphasize the "importance of light and moving from darkness, so we can experience a library we think is quite inventive but works on a practical and experiential level," said architect Victor Vines, a member of the team.

MASS Design Group of Boston, with LDA Architects, of Cleveland, and other consultants offered the most radical proposal.

It called for a library with an apartment tower set completely behind it, requiring the developers to sacrifice the "air rights" space over the library, in which apartments could otherwise be built.

But members of the MASS team contended their concept would result in a better library and apartment building, which could be made taller than initially imagined with better views and more apartments to compensate for losing the air space over the library.

The MASS concept called for a ground floor with a computer lab and auditorium, and a large upstairs reading room with movable book stacks enabling it to be transformed into a large multi-purpose space.

The team conceived of a plaza outside the building as a space paved in the same quilt pattern as the building itself, with features including a shallow infinity pool and a staircase that would double as an outdoor amphitheater.

"This is not one building, it's three building," said architect Michael Murphy of MASS. "It's an event space, a performance venue, and a library."