Description

Luckenwalde Library is the oldest institution of its kind in the state of Brandenburg. Founded in 1846 as a library for an association, it opened to the public in 1915, becoming the town’s public library in 1937. In the late 1990s, space constraints in the villa it had occupied since 1966 made it necessary to find a new location. The choice fell on the building of the town’s railway station, which had been decommissioned by Deutsche Bahn in 1988 and had failed to attract a private investor. In 2005, a competition was organised, which was won by the consortium of the Berlin-based architecture offices of raumbewegung and ff-architekten. The project, which cost 3.9 million euros including furnishings, was largely financed through subsidies, including from the EU’s “URBAN II” programme. The children’s and youth library is located in a new extension – a gleaming gold structure that projects dynamically into the station forecourt, announcing its presence.
The soft edges and lounge-like design within both echoes the cool interiors of Berlin’s clubs and bars and provides a varied reading landscape for the children’s and youth library, with separate areas for the different age groups on two levels. The lower area is reserved for younger visitors, with a large window that is also the library’s “shop window” to the city. The older visitors have their own separate, screened off area overlooking the railway area, with more serious workstations. On the upper floor is a separate room not permanently supervised by staff that is intended for collaborative work and features a large table with computer workstations. The sloping walls and rounded edges lead casually from one area to another, creating transitions between the various spaces. The building’s form alludes to Erich Mendelsohn’s expressionist Steinberg Hat Factory in Luckenwalde.
As eye-catching as the extension is, the main task facing the architects was to transfer the programmatic requirements of a library to the various different-sized rooms of the railway station, and to harmonise the needs of a historical listed structure with those of a new use in a coherent whole. The station was built towards the end of the German Empire when the Berlin-Dresden railway line was widened in Luckenwalde during the First World War. The station building was originally connected to a railway embankment via a single-storey extension, though this was demolished during the conversion work despite objections by conservationists, as this was the only way to free up the station building. Since the conversion, the building is now more distinctly set apart from its former railway facilities.
The section that once housed the waiting rooms and utility spaces, as well as the former residence of the stationmaster, extends out of one side of the main railway building and its reception hall. Accordingly, the size of the interiors gradually decreases. The largest architectural intervention is a recessed gallery in the former waiting room for second class passengers, reached by a single flight of stairs: a bright red painted wall, along which the visitor ascends, visually echoes the voluminous furniture in the former reception hall. Together with the former waiting room for first class passengers, this was the main focus of the conservation work.
The most significant enhancement is the opened-up interior of the reception hall, which can now be experienced to its full extent, and serves, once again, as a public foyer: a space for reading the papers, looking up information and enjoying a coffee. The city also uses the station concourse for events. Between the non-fiction collection in the second class waiting room and the children’s library, there is also a seminar room, and the first class waiting room is now as a reading room.

Originally published in Bauwelt 44.2008, pp. 28-33, abridged and edited for Building Types Online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

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