Best of #libraries

The theme of the library combines the design of the public space with the design of the space of knowledge.

An interesting field of intervention that in recent years – with the development of new information technologies – has seen a profound change of functional spaces and ways of usage.

Mecanoo faced the theme of the “library of the future” in the project developed with Martinez + Johnson that has been chosen to revitalize the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington DC. Signed by Mecanoo is also the new Library of Birmingham, a transparent glass building wrapped in a filigree pattern of metal circles which are bold and refined interlocking stories of industrial heritage. About transparecy is also the Chelles Multimedia Library, a public structure in Paris by Atelier Novembre, that is a powerful statement from a urban, landscape and functional perspective.

Often, the design of a new library becomes an opportunity and a focal point of a broader intervention for the architectural and social redevelopment of entire urban areas. Among these The Pinch, a library and community center in Shuanghe Village, Yunnan Province, China, designed by Olivier Ottevaere and John Lin; in a completely different contest, the King Fahad National Library, the library designed by Gerber Architekten that represents the new centre of the rapidly changing Olaya District in Riad; and the Science Library by Badia-Berger in Versailles, composed of three juxtaposed volumes intersected by a series of voids, which acts as a connector between a sloped park to the east and a campus' vast western sporting grounds.

The theme of the library also lends itself to architectonical experimentation, like in Musashino Place, a composite cultural public institution in Tokyo planned by kw+hg architects as an assembly of space unites which are deduced from human proportions.

Best of #libraries:
– Mecanoo: MLK Library
– Mecanoo: Library of Birmingham
– Chelles Multimedia Library
– The Pinch: phase II
– The Pinch: phase I
– King Fahad National Library
– Badia-Berger: Science Library
– kw+hg: Musashino Place