Description

The library, sited on the northern bank of the Lima River, acknowledges the significance of the water to the history of this town in the northern Portuguese region of the Alto Minho. Once a fishing village, Viana do Castelo reached its Golden Age in the 15th and 16th centuries as the harbor from which sailed many of Portugal’s celebrated voyagers.

The library is part of a master plan for the reorganization and development of the waterfront. Constructed of white concrete with a continuous stone base, the library consists of two parts: a low L-shaped volume, raised 65 cm above the level of the land, and a 45 × 45 m volume that is raised one story around a 20 × 20 m central void. The raised volume is designed to permit a full view of the river both at a pedestrian level and from a considerable portion of the building interior.

The library program is divided between the raised volume that houses the reading rooms and books and the lower L-shaped building that contains administrative offices, meeting rooms, reception and archives. Public access is through a set of doors within the space of the void while staff access is placed at the eastern end of the lower block. Through the use of two minimal supports, the raised volume allows for an expansive vista of the river, expressing the horizontal line of the river bank without a self-conscious framing of the view. This vista is reinforced on the interior through bands of windows in the reading rooms.

The structure of the library is similarly differentiated between the upper and lower volumes. The lower L-shaped building is a typical construction of solid/steel concrete mixed slabs resting on reinforced concrete load-bearing walls with foundations. The raised volume with its expansive horizontal view is achieved through the use of long-span construction. The structure, prefabricated in sections in the shop, consists of a grid of latticed beams supported at one end upon the lower building and, at the other end, upon the two expressed supports.

In 2009, the official citation from RIBA in honoring Siza with the Royal Gold Medal stated that “the forging of a masterful and seemingly inevitable architecture out of the possibilities of a site is one of the supreme characteristics of Álvaro Siza’s architecture.” The Biblioteca Municipal exemplifies this statement in its profound simplicity, its spare and minimal response to the physical context of the river and its relationship to the city.

“Peter Halley talks to Dan Cameron – ‘80s Then – Interview”, http://petter-halley.blogspot.de

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Originally published in: Nolan Lushington, Wolfgang Rudorf, Liliane Wong, Libraries: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2016.