Description

Since the pervasiveness of the internet, the library – as a 19th century institution – has found itself in troubled waters. Online encyclopaedias, search engines and social media as informal repositories of knowledge are challenging it from every direction. Budget cuts for public institutions have further undermined their standing.
Reactions to this transformation of the institution have varied: in some places computer terminals have supplanted bookshelves, other libraries have fallen back on the design strategies of department stores to stage their “wares”, and some have monumentalised the book, as seen in Dominique Perrault’s glass book towers at the National Library in Paris.
In Spijkenisse near Rotterdam, MVRDV have created a library in the form of a book mountain: a seemingly endless pile of books under a glass pyramid. Spijkenisse is a young city with around 70,000 inhabitants, which owes its growth after the Second World War to the relocation of the port of Rotterdam westwards. In 1976, Spijkenisse was declared a New Town with a metro connection to Rotterdam as well as a number of other metropolitan facilities.
The new library in the centre of Spijkenisse sees itself as an advertisement for reading in the heart of the nearby town centre. Alongside the more than 70,000 books stacked there in a spiralling bookscape, the base of the building also contains areas for commercial use. Above it are a reading café, an environmental centre, shops and all the library’s facilities: the counters for lending books, an auditorium, meeting rooms and administration offices. The counters for issuing books are located on the first level in the corners. The concentric organisation of the building means that the building has a more outward orientation and staff and visitors have only a limited view of what is happening on the hill. The books are likewise placed at the perimeter which means that putting books back in the shelves involves walking long distances.
The book plateaus are connected by broad, gently rising stairs and the shelves largely follow the path of the walls to the offices behind them. To allow daylight to penetrate deeper into the bookscape, the bookshelves are given recesses here and there. In some places they turn inwards to form a quiet zone or room, as well as to provide access to the canteen, but at no point can one cross the building through the middle. Since the architects made no distinction between reading and access areas, readers browsing the shelves are constantly encountering visitors climbing the “mountain”. On the first three levels, visitors may walk around the core of the building. On the fourth level, a route leads across the reading room on that level and then up a staircase to a modest room on the fifth floor.
The glass canopy is supported by wooden trusses that define the atmosphere inside. The dimensions of the building are enormous, with a 34 × 47 metres footprint and 26 metres in height. The construction consists of 116 frames secured at three points, and to ensure a sufficient load-bearing capacity and rigidity of the roof, the wooden trusses have a relatively narrow axial interval of 1.35 metres. Thanks to the uniform cross-section of 20 × 100 cm, the building’s architectural appearance is also uniform. The backbone of the roof is formed by a ridge beam of 20 × 140 cm and the interior radiates a palpable sense of calm, allowing the books to shine. For this reason, cables and operating equipment were integrated into the structural members as far as possible. The library manages to do without air conditioning. Fresh air enters through grates just above the floor, and exhaust air is extracted through window flaps in the roof. Geothermal heat is utilised by means of heat pumps, and heating and cooling is achieved through concrete core activation. A weather station located in the ridge automatically controls solar protection measures, and rainwater is collected in the basement and reused as grey water.

Originally published in Bauwelt  04.2013, pp. 26-31, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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