Description

The transformation of Stuttgart’s inner-city railroad terminal, allowing the reclamation of 109 hectares of underutilized real estate, is at the core of the very controversial planning initiative Stuttgart 21. The Stadtbibliothek, part of this urban redevelopment project, was initially envisioned in 1997 as “Bibliothek Stuttgart 21”. It is placed as a translucent monolith on a small quadrilateral block and conceived as space and platform for community and the collection of knowledge. Eun Young Yi reinterprets archetypal space configurations, proportions and geometries ingrained into the collective memory of humanity. A cube or hexahedron is associated with the classical element “earth”, and as the only regular Platonic solid able to tessallate Euclidian space, generates the volume of the library. A regular grid of in-situ concrete frames, filled with frosted glass blocks around a rectangular, unprotected opening, constitutes the exterior skin of the double-envelope system, ensuring high-density light levels and even glare-free distribution. At night, blue LED lights transform the white crystalline day appearance of the building into a light sculpture.

Nestled in the plan center of the large cube is a smaller hexahedron, referred to as the “heart”. This communal meditative space, the inner sanctum, void of any function, serves the purpose of deceleration; the volume, like the outer cube, bears no orientative suggestions and is accessible from the exterior square loop through openings on all four sides. Rectangular wall incisions in the form of windows or indentations and the small, square, skylight-like coffers and oculi, respectively paired with the proportional qualities of a cube, are reminiscent of the archetypal paradigm of the pantheon.

The “heart” is encapsulated by an enclosed, circumferential helical stair system providing access to the four colonnade-like library floors surrounding the central space; above the “heart”, the stairs open up onto the ground level of the reading gallerias designed in the shape of an inverted stepped pyramid with linear bookshelves lining the outer perimeter of the terraces. Abundant daylight, directed by adjustable photovoltaic-clad louvers, floods into the negative, ziggurat-like form through a large skylight. The unifying monochromatic color concept of the exterior skin finds continuation on the interior; only the book spines set colorful accents. Typically, double-faced shelving units are arranged within the inner circumferential loop in a perpendicular fashion, while work spaces and meeting rooms occupy the periphery along the inner thermal glass facade. The cube displays the word “library” in different languages.

---

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