BaO Architects

Public libraries are, and have always been, pivotal elements of both social and urban landscapes. Their nature has been steadily evolving from being pure "Temple of knowledge" that gathers, stores and makes accessible man's past and present erudition, to open and multipurpose cultural centers. They now permit an increasingly wide array of community activities such as social gathering, cultural activities, information, education and leisure. Accordingly, the typology has been slowly shifting from monumental and massive classical buildings to transparent open structures that allegedly embody a sense of publicness and democracy.



The project proposes to investigate this core paradox: public buildings simultaneously aspire to become noticeable urban monuments, firmly representing the collective values of a community, while being open and generous buildings. Based on this observation and the evolving nature of libraries, we tried to question the contemporary consensus that tends to arbitrarily mingle openness, transparency and publicness. Our design plays on and exhibits the dialectic between closed-massive-monumental-introverted and open-transparent-light-extroverted elements. This approach resulted in a somewhat straightforward architectural gesture: a black opaque volume floating within a glazed transparent box.

Be it for the inside sequence of spaces or for the outside overall appearance, the clear-cut organization of the building is uncompromising and easily legible: a cultural open lobby (extroverted), a closed library (introverted), an open lounge and children's library (extroverted). The black box contains what could be dubbed a "traditional library space", the core program of the building. It hovers 7 meters above ground in order to shelter the public lobby, the cultural multipurpose spaces, the amphitheater and the digital library on the ground floor. Softer types of library programs such as the lounge and the children's library are placed on top of the library in order to profit of a maximum of sunlight, tranquility and a 360 degrees panoramic view of the city around.