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Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
These beautiful libraries are known for noteworthy exteriors think soaring architecture and bountiful gardens and interiors featuring designs like frescoed ceilings or walls made entirely of glass.
Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
A library is a collection of materials, books, or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical or digital access to materials and maybe a physical location or a virtual space, or both.
These beautiful libraries are known for noteworthy exteriors think soaring architecture and bountiful gardens and interiors featuring designs like painted ceilings or walls made entirely of glass.
And that’s nothing compared to the millions of books housed within their walls. If you are a lover of books, art designs or architecture start adding these libraries to your must-visit list.
In this article, we’ve provided you with the Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
1. Royal Danish Library, Denmark
Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
The Royal Library in Copenhagen is the national library of Denmark and the university library of the University of Copenhagen. It is among the largest libraries in the world and the largest in the Nordic countries. In 2017, it merged with the State and University Library in Aarhus to form a combined national library. The combined library organization of the separate library locations in Copenhagen and Aarhus are maintained is known as the Royal Danish Library.
It contains numerous historical treasures and a copy of all works printed in Denmark since the 17th century are deposited there. Thanks to extensive donations in the past, the library holds nearly all known Danish printed works back to and including the first Danish books, printed in 1482 by Johann Snell.
2. Stuttgart City Library, Germany
Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
The Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart is the public library of the city of Stuttgart. It is organized as a department of the city’s cultural office and comprises the central library, 17 city district libraries, and two bookmobiles. The entrances of the building are on all four sides of the cube. The house consists of four types of rooms, lined up layer by layer like onion skins.
The glass block facade forms the outer layer. Behind it lies the glass interior façade. In the gaps between the layers, you can find the accesses. As for the inner staircase and the outer corridors and balconies, it uses a strolling walkway design. In 2013, it received the national award as Library of the Year.
3. French National Library, Richelieu Building, Paris
Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
France’s national public library system is truly historic, having been founded by King Charles V in 1368; coincidentally, this particular location on the Rue de Richelieu, in the heart of Paris, opened exactly 500 years later. The Richelieu Library is dominated by its enormous central reading space called the “Oval Room,” which was constructed between 1875 and 1932 by academic architect Jean-Louis Pascal, following the death of the library’s original designer, Henri Labrouste.
As the name suggests, Pascal added a rounded room that boasts curved, five-story-high walls brimming with bookshelves, and multiple round skylights that project light throughout. The library also houses an impressive collection of historic French artworks, including original illustrations by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and 16th-century maps of Paris.
4. Sendai Mediatheque, Japan
Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
Sendai Mediatheque is a library in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. The structure of the Sendai Mediatheque is composed of three main elements: tubes, plates, and skin.
The plates are composed of a honeycomb-like network of steel sections infilled with lightweight concrete. The steel honeycomb structure allows the plate to span between irregularly spaced vertical supports without beams, and with minimal thickness of the slab itself. Each floor hosts a different set of the building’s many facilities which are more or less free to interact with each other over the surface of a given plate.
The skin or facade treatment differs on all five exposed sides of the building, modulating light and views, and creating uniformity across each face of the cube during the day. The main (south-facing) facade is double-glazed and functions as part of the building’s climate control system. The materials which compose the skin are glass, steel panels, and aluminum mesh.
The tubes also house the vertical circulation of air, water, electricity, light, and people within the building. The constant motion of people through the stairs and elevators, as well as the glow of light passing through these tubes, creates a perceptual link between the floors, and the functions they house, which might otherwise have felt isolated from one another. Because the tubes create links throughout the full height of the building, they are often glazed to provide fire protection between floors. Sendai Mediatheque was designed by Toyo Ito in 1995 and completed in 2001.
5. Geisel Library, San Diego
Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
Geisel Library is the main library building of the University of California, San Diego. It is named in honor of Audrey and Theodor Seuss Geisel. The building’s distinctive architecture, described as occupying “a fascinating nexus between brutalism and futurism”, has resulted in its being featured in the UC San Diego logo and becoming the most recognizable building on campus.
The library was designed by William Pereira and opened in 1970 as the Central Library. It was renovated in 1993 and rededicated as the University Library Building and renamed Geisel Library in 1995.
Geisel Library is located in the center of the UC San Diego campus. It houses over 7 million volumes to support the educational and research objectives of the university.
6. Lawrence Public Library, by Gould Evans
Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
Lawrence’s new library has the bones of its old one. Originally built in 1972, architects at Gould Evans recently gutted the library and renovated it to be more modern and tech-forward. While observing visitors, the architects realized people naturally gathered in the locations with the most natural lighting. This led them to create a reading room with floor-to-ceiling windows.
7. Beyazit Library, by Tabanlioglu Architects
Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
Beyazıt State Library is a book depositary and digital library in Istanbul. One of Turkey’s oldest libraries, it is the first national library of Ottoman manuscripts and one of the country’s six legal deposit libraries.
The library houses Ottoman periodicals, newspapers, magazines, and other historical records. In all, it contains 1.5 million published materials 900,000 books, 65,000 postcards, maps, cinema posters, 33,000 different magazines, and more than 5,000 audiobooks. It was visited by nearly 140,000 readers in 2018 and hosted more than 67,000 readers in the first six months of 2019. It covers an area of about 3,000 square meters on the eastern side of Beyazıt Square.
8. The Library of El Escorial, Spain
Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
Not only is this Spanish library a work of art, but it’s also part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial also known as the Escurialense or the Laurentina, is a large Spanish Renaissance library founded by Philip II, located in San Lorenzo de El Escorial and part of the heritage of the monastery of El Escorial.
The Escorial has three libraries. One is located behind the Chorus of the Basilica. Another, within the monastery itself, used to be distributed to the different cells and rooms of the monks, and the Augustine monks have gradually managed to make their own. Finally, the Royal Library is public and exists under a special papal bull of protection.
9. Belarus National Library
Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
Belarus National Library is the biggest library in the Republic of Belarus. The library is located in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. It houses the largest collection of Belarusian printed materials and the third-largest collection of books in Russian behind the Russian State Library (Moscow) and the Russian National Library (Saint Petersburg).
10. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is the rare book library and literary archive of the Yale University Library in New Haven, Connecticut. It is one of the largest buildings in the world dedicated to rare books and manuscripts. Established by a gift of the Beinecke family and given its own financial endowment, the library is financially independent of the university and is co-governed by the University Library and Yale Corporation.
Top 10 Libraries With State-Of-The Art Architectures And Designs
- Royal Danish Library, Denmark
- Stuttgart City Library, Germany
- French National Library, Richelieu Building, Paris
- Sendai Mediatheque, Japan
- Geisel Library, San Diego
- Lawrence Public Library, by Gould Evans
- Beyazit Library, by Tabanlioglu Architects
- The Library of El Escorial, Spain
- Belarus National Library
- Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
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