Biblioteca Central Estatal de Guanajuato Wigberto Jiménez Moreno

Liliane Wong

Description

Located in León de los Aldama, usually called Léon and one of Mexico’s commercial and industrial centers, the Biblioteca Central Estatal de Guanajuato Wigberto Moreno Jiménez (Guanajuato State Central Library) serves the most populous city in the state of Guanajuato. The library was completed in 2008 as part the Forum Cultural Guanajuato, a 9.6 hectare complex for the promotion of culture, arts, entertainment and cultural tourism. The library was the first project to be built from a master plan of 2003 that also includes a performing arts center, an art museum, a new graduate-level art school and a commercial hub with a hotel, retail, cinemas and restaurants.

Previously housed in the Old Jail, the new 6,750 m² library consists of two stone, glass and steel volumes on an elevated terrace. These modern, rectangular two- and three-story structures are connected by a two-level glass gallery and served by a monumental staircase with views to the gardens. A three-story white steel pergola covering much of the elevated terrace and the lower volume provides an iconic element to the corporate exterior. The use of cantera, a local volcanic stone used for centuries for major civic buildings in this region, is an attempt to relate this modern building to the historic fabric of this 450-year old city famous for its leather manufacturing.

The library houses 170,000 volumes and accommodates up to 2,400 visitors daily. As Guanajuato state’s public library, the primary spaces include a reading room, a periodicals room, an internet room, an audio-visual room with facilities for both private and individual viewing and other special dedicated spaces. The children’s room includes the “Bebeteca”, a special space dedicated to babies and children under the age of three. Intended to foster an early love of reading, this tiny space designed for a maximum of three small children and their parents uses color, texture and other visual and tactile means to achieve its goal. The Braille room for the visually impaired houses equipment such as talking calculators, tape recorders, relief maps, Braille printers as well as over 150 titles in Braille. A special collections room includes the book collection of Professor Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, an historian, linguist and anthropologist from León for whom the library is named, and the collection of Mary Esther, his wife. The Wigberto Jiménez Moreno Collection comprises 40,000 titles and includes a collection of New Testaments in 100 Mexican languages.

The notable spaces, a skylit atrium and the grand staircase, are variants of the same geometric concept – orthogonal spaces centrally occupied by a circular form. The site plan, too, reiterates this idea in a set of circular, recessed steps sunken into a rectilinear field of geometric paving. This circle of steps, faintly reminiscent of the Greek bouleuterion (literally, a place for planning), holds a tenuous relationship to the library in its alignment with one of the columns of the steel pergola hovering over the building. While these circular steps seemingly have no relationship with the centralized forms of the building itself, their placement in the larger landscape and their alignment to gateways and pathways of buildings not yet built affirm their role to connect the library to the future Forum Cultural Guanajuato. As such, the prominence of the three-story pergola is clarified especially in light of the proposed design for the Performing Arts Center which, too, includes a high steel pergola of a similar vocabulary.

As Mexico’s leading producer of leather and leather goods, León is a prosperous city. The civic leaders sought to enhance the city with this cultural center including the state library. As part of a larger complex, the public library assumes a different role. Often referred to as the “living room” of the community it serves, the library in this case must include in its mission the larger vision of the city’s cultural initiative. In a departure from the iconographic facades of many public libraries, large and small, the Guanajuato State Central does not establish itself as an identifiable civic monument of learning. Rather, through a common architectural element of the master plan, a steel pergola, it becomes part of an extensive cultural whole for the city.