MAD Architects   China   This seamless-looking white structure molded in concrete contains a sinuous library and a block of mixed amenities – cafés, public restrooms, a nursery room, among others – for the citizens of Haikou, capital of Hainan, China’s southernmost province.

Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei   Germany   The annex sought not only to accommodate new programs but also to improve a complicated urban situation characterized by loosely related buildings and a heavily used street. A new underground parking garage forms an entrance square that connects the

Foster + Partners   United Arab Emirates   Close to the airport, 10 kilometers from the center of Sharjah, stands this two-floor building by the British firm Foster + Partners. Overhangs 15 meters wide shade the facades against the sun, and aluminum lattices varying in density filter solar ra

Mecanoo   China   The new library will rise by Tap Seac Square in the historical center of Macau, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its grid facade recalls the exterior of the building that stands on the site, the former Hotel Estoril. Where the main entrance is, the skin

Mecanoo MAYU architects   Taiwan   The 37,000-square-meter building for Taiwan’s oldest city presents an inverted stepped shape designed by Mecanoo, the Dutch firm headed by Francine Houben, in collaboration with the local office Mayu Architects. Held up by quartets of slender white c

Steven Holl   United States   On the banks of the East River, a branch of the Queens Public Library addresses a call for community space in an almost exclusively residential neighborhood. The building, low and compact, takes up little ground, and makes the much used riverside par

Open Architecture   China   The firm headed by Li Hu and Huang Wenjing, Open Architecture, working from offices in New York and Beijing, has designed a campus for the Qingpu Pinghe International School in Shanghai, which has students aged 4 through 18. One of the buildings, the

gmp Architekten   China   In the Chinese province of Jiangsu, in the eastern part of the country, Changzhou is a 2,500 year old city with a dense network of rivers that is becoming the new industrial and technological hub in the prosperous Yangtze River delta area. There in C

Kengo Kuma   Norway   In what is one of Norway’s oldest cities, birthplace of its most universal man of letters, the project of Kengo Kuma – in collaboration with the Norwegian firm Mad Arkitekter – has placed first in the competition to build a library devoted to the pla

Snøhetta   United States   The Norwegian firm Snøhetta has won the competition for the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, which is to go up in Medora, North Dakota, on the banks of the Little Missouri River. Selected out of 40 entries, including the proposals of co-final

MAD Architects   China   The building, included in the Haikou Bay rejuvenation plan, will house a new public space. The continuous white concrete structure lets natural light pass through holes and conceals the installations, creating visual consistency...

‘This will kill that.’ In Victor Hugo’s prophecy – which was also McLuhan’s – ‘this’ referred to books and ‘that’ to cathedrals. It was a process of creative destruction that lasted as long as it took digitalization to arrive, and with it a new proph

A barn in the German municipality of Kressbronn, near Lake Constance, has been turned by Thomas and Christine Steimle into a library and community center. In deference to the building’s history, the project balances past and present. The renovation i

The New York Times   Michael Kimmelman   The Hunters Point Community Library is one of the finest public buildings New York has produced this century. But it cost more than $40 million, took a decade and almost died.  Against a phalanx of mostly dreary new apartment towers, the soon-to-open

Massimo Listri (Florence, 1953) began his career as a photographer when he was just 17 years old, collaborating with numerous publications dedicated to art and architecture, his two other great passions. He founded the mythical magazine FMR with Fran

Libraries have been one of the symbols of bourgeois society. Originally confined to monasterios and palaces, distant havens of elitist knowledge, libraries eventually became quintessential public spaces in the capitalist and increasingly democratic c

According to the hyperurban Koolhaas, the future of humanity is in the countryside. Not so with the present. Which is why he continues to work in places that can hardly be called rural: the poleis of Europe, the megacities of China, or the kingdoms o

In the port city of Tianjin (population 15.47 million), the Dutch firm MVRDV recently completed an immense library with a huge inner eye that can be glimpsed from the street and which, being so spectacularly disturbing, reminds one of the eye of Suar

A cornerstone laying ceremony was recently held at the site of the new National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, designed by the Swiss partnership Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with the Tel Aviv firm Mann Shinar. The building stands on a slo

The firm Herzog & de Meuron was selected to build Israel’s new National Library in Jerusalem, wrapping up a process that began with the selection of the proposal submitted by USbased Israeli Rafi Segal, which authorship issues eventually prevented fr

Bajo una gran pirámide acristalada, una montaña de libros invita a la lectura en una estructura de terrazas apiladas: así es el nuevo edificio de MVRDV para la biblioteca pública de la ciudad de Spijkenisse, a unos 20 kilómetros de Rotterdam. Con una

El proyecto del israelí Rafi Segal es el ganador del concurso para la nueva sede de la Biblioteca Nacional de Israel en Jerusalén, que ha sido organizado por dicha institución y la Fundación Rothschild, desarrollándose en varias fases y contando con

Stuart A. P. Murray   Madrid  2014  
La Esfera de los Libros   - 394 Pages