World’s biggest library reading space, in Beijing, was inspired by nature and designed to be a place where ‘everyone is under the same sky’
- The Beijing City Library houses the planet’s largest library reading space, designed to look like a valley of rice paddies with trees growing out of a river
- The Norwegian architectural firm that won a competition to design the library described the space as a ‘reading landscape’
What do you picture at mention of the word “library”? Mountains? Rivers? Trees? Rice paddies?
Correct. At least in the case of shimmering new knowledge repository the Beijing City Library – which is where you’ll also find the planet’s largest library reading space, ratified by
Guinness World Records.
At 21,809 square metres (235,000 square feet), the cavernous expanse incorporates the dominant section of a building that might look intergalactic to some of its target audience: all sorts of people of all ages.
Its copper-coloured, environmentally friendly roof is peppered with photovoltaic components to maximise generation of renewable energy from sunlight. Below it stand multi-laminated transparent walls up to 16 metres (52 feet) high, constituting China’s first self-supporting glass facade, its zigzag, folded design meaning one piece bolsters the next.
Up the valley sides are terraced “hills” of stepped seating recalling rice paddies; and gazing down on the whole ecosystem is a forest canopy of overlapping giant ginkgo leaves, in which the tops of glass-reinforced gypsum columns flare out, supporting the roof and draining rainwater for recycling. Real ginkgo trees have been planted outside.
The library’s overall sustainability quotient has earned it a Three-Star Green Building Evaluation Label, China’s highest ranking.
As designer – and Snohetta managing director for international projects – Robert Greenwood has described it, being inside the library is like “sitting under a tree reading a book”. Appropriate, given the generous use of solid white oak.
