Description

The original building of the Württemberg State Library from 1970, designed by the architect Horst Linde (1912–2016) and his colleagues at the State Building Department, occupies a difficult site alongside a major traffic artery that separates the library from Stuttgart’s Akademiegarten and is used by some 100,000 cars a day. The architects Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei (LRO) designed an extension that occupies this roadside site, and subsequently also refurbished the existing building, which has since been accorded listed status. The new extension, a light grey four-storey rectangular block that rises to five-storeys along the street, sports a jagged roofline, diagonally inset as well as porthole-like window openings and a curved ventilation stack. Positioned hard up against the corner of Ulrichstraße, it causes the original library to recede into the background. The siting of the extension on the front, northern corner was the only realistic solution – an option Horst Linde himself had also outlined in a design sketch – but the voluminous structure interrupts the sight lines between the two buildings by Linde, the State Library and the State Parliament.

According to the architect Arno Lederer, the existing building is a high-quality, spacious structure: Linde’s design choreographs the path to the catalogues and lending desk via a wide ramp and staircase, followed by offices and reading rooms. The books were banished to underground stacks. The library previously housed more than four million books, with a smaller collection housed in reading rooms and two off-site locations. The redesign now provides open access to as much of this as possible in the new building, albeit using archive shelving with hand cranks on the first floor. Around a tenth of the collection – some 350,000 volumes – could not be accommodated in the new extension and were moved to an external storage facility for the duration of the renovation of the old building. The new extension needed to accommodate not just the books, but also around 350 workstations during the refurbishment of the existing building.

A light well in the centre of the almost 40-metre-deep building allows subdued daylight into the heart of the library, while an exhibition and event space flanks the entire front of the building, creating a sense of spaciousness, not least because the ceiling sweeps upwards by a storey where it meets the road. The ends of this space can be additionally divided off for use as lecture spaces. The main entrance is a level above the road on the south side and is reached by a new forecourt between the State Archives, the new extension and existing buildings, from which an entrance leads into Linde’s original building. At the street-side entrance, below the exhibition hall, there are cloakroom lockers on the right and a café on the left.

The materials are kept simple: exposed concrete and contrasting black and white inside, with slate flooring and birchwood on the street level. Outside, the concrete has a lighter tone. Diagonally inset windows are grouped to form jagged bands that extend across two floors. The street and ground floors thus form a visual unit, as do the second and third floors. Between them is a row of portholes, at the top, a row of narrow slots. The symmetrical pattern of the jagged shed roof, its north-facing roof lights allowing calm light into the interior, is reminiscent of a factory. In this factory for learning, the desks are positioned all around the façade. The windows on the second and third floors, which are set at a 45-degree angle, offer a view of the city centre in one direction and of the State Parliament and Opera House in the other. The intermediate diagonal-set panels are clad externally with copper as a reference to the old building.

Originally published in Bauwelt 3.2021, pp. 26-33, abridged and edited for Building Types Online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

 

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