Description

The municipal library in the northern French university town of Caen is a surprisingly modest new building. Its outward appearance, in particular, is restrained. Inside, however, OMA has continued to explore ideas on open libraries that the office has been pursuing for 30 years. According to Rem Koolhaas, today’s libraries are a hybrid of old and new: while one of the oldest building typologies of all time, libraries have over the past 30 years undergone a significant conceptual shift as a result of digitalisation. The multimedia library in Caen cost a total of 64 million euros and testifies to the architects’ intention to create an open building that is generous and accommodating to its visitors. The building was named after the French historian and politician Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), whose most famous work “On Democracy in America” remains as relevant as ever.

The library has a X-shaped footprint with building wings of unequal length. The four wings pick up two axes of orientation that have been of great importance for the city. The two wings to the north and west point to the towers of the two impressive monasteries Abbaye aux Hommes and Abbaye aux Dames. The third wing of the building faces the nearby railway station to the south, and the fourth wing faces an urban development area that extends east and north on a long peninsula between the Canal de Caen à la Mer and the river Orne, a 600 hectare large site with the poetic name “La Grande Mosaïque”. The library on Quai François Mitterrand is situated on a former harbour basin at the junction between the city and the new urban development area, which when complete will provide some 7000 new dwellings.

The brief for the library was both for a repository for books in the traditional sense as well as a vibrant forum and meeting place befitting of a modern society including related didactic and social facilities. For OMA this translated into the idea of an “opposition of mass and void”. The architects realised this by making the entirety of the X of the first floor a column-free area for bookshelves and the reading room. The floor above is lower in height and articulated as two intersecting girder trusses with lengths of 96 and 85 metres respectively.

On the ground floor, the cross-shaped complex is designed as a spacious foyer with different functions at the ends of the respective building wings: to the west is a small exhibition area, to the south a café, to the north the lecture hall and to the east the automated book return system with conveyor belts to the book stacks (415,000 books) in the basement, which also contains a garage for the library vehicles and other ancillary spaces. The lecture hall with space for 150 visitors descends steeply from the ground floor to the basement. A silver curtain with small slits designed by Petra Blaisse can be used to screen the glass walls at the top of the lecture hall on the ground floor.

In the middle of the entrance hall is a large semi-circular wooden form with shelves for magazines that conceals the toilets. Two escalators lead up to the reading room. As is typical of OMA’s architecture, the theme of upward movement is also emphasised structurally, sometimes also demonstratively in colour. The aspect of ascent is the key moment within the library, the visitor ascending directly into the large reading room and its lofty 2500 m² column-free interior. All sides of the space are glazed from top to bottom providing a virtually 360° panorama of the city. The individual glazed sections (2 × 6.20 m) have an outer surface that curves 40 cm outwards, which slightly distorts the view but ensures the façade has the necessary stability without the need for additional supporting elements. The inner glass surface is flat. Protection against sun and glare is provided by the use of special glass and internal white roller blinds. There is no additional air conditioning; instead fresh air enters at the foot of the windows with exhaust air being extracted via the suspended ceiling.

The furnishings afford complete flexibility: all shelves are mounted on castors and can be easily rearranged, as can the seating and recliners. The four wings of the building each house a primary subject area: natural sciences, technology, literature and art. As on the ground floor, the four ends of the wings are used differently: one has a stepped wooden reading structure with individual coloured seats, another a wall with opening flaps that function as a picture gallery, a third a perforated aluminium projection screen across almost the entire width and height of the wall, and the last enclosed reading rooms.

Further rooms are available for group work on a mezzanine level. At the end points are structural supports for the large truss framework construction of the floor above that together with the stair core enables the first floor to be a column-free space. A second reflective silver escalator leads to the second floor. Here the spatial impression is quite different, with the angular steel framework featuring prominently in the 3.3-metre-high space. This level houses the children’s library with rather mundane furnishings scattered between the supports and struts as well as a storytelling area with seating balls that can be curtained off. The offices and meeting rooms of the 85 employees are also on this level. Public access to the three atriums is limited. A rectangular courtyard with seating steps dips down into the level of the reading room below, which can be seen through a narrow band of windows. Given the high standard of the building and its spatial qualities, this floor appears to be seriously compromised by the constraints of the crossing lattice girders and is less successful as a result. The structure of the steel girders is visible from inside and outside through the window bands. From outside, the building communicates a simple, almost neutral appearance with opaque, slightly greenish surfaces of frosted glass and large glazed areas, always with the same vertical delineation.

Originally published in Bauwelt 04.2017, pp. 38-47, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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