Linnaeus
- Luckily, the question of what to add to the Asplund building in order to transform it into a contemporary library has already been answered by Asplund himself in 1928. The solution is available; we only need to discover its richness and understand how it fits the requirements and challenges the organization of a contemporary library.
2.The new Public Library is organized as a garden of knowledge. Librarians take care of the Library as gardeners, modifying its regions according to different seasons, trying humble yet radical experiments, growing new possibilities to approach culture. Gardens, as classification devices and experimental fields, propose a way to organize knowledge that is both stable and open, both rooted and evolving, both practical and innovative.
3.The question of a performing library and the question of a building close to a neo-classical masterpiece strangely find a common, and simple, answer. The availability of a precise answer for the problem in terms of volumes defines a clear starting point to imagine a contemporary library.
Gunnar Erik Asplund’s 1928 scheme for four thin towers and terraces along Odengatan shows a solution able to reconcile the openings towards the Observatory Hill, the attention towards the existing Library and the strong urban character of the new building. Our first decision is not to waste this knowledge, not to refuse a suitable option, not to look for alternatives if an easy solution is at disposal. This decision is not nostalgic, nor pretends to be objective.
There is no nostalgia in a choice that is just about volumes, just about the best disposition of built matter in a given place, just about the easiest way to link this part of the city with the landscape of the Observatory Hill. This outspoken neoclassical attitude simply means that we trust the possibility to share aesthetic values with the past [and, that is the same, with the future] and to work starting from a collective architectural knowledge.
The choice to reuse a couple of Asplund’s drawings does not imply any attempt to look for an objective philological justification for our design decisions. Asplund made many different proposals for the area, and we simply recognize a drawing that is incredibly good, and incredibly rich in terms of a possible contemporary development. This decision is no less in danger, no less fragile than any other design decision we could take. Being as close as possible to Asplund 1928 scheme, the new building enjoys immediate intimacy with the existing library. At the same time, such a radical exercise on repetition produces a suspended, displacing object, both alien and familiar.
4.The required 16.500 sqm of the new Library cannot fit into the four slim bodies, Asplund designed in 1928.
The new Library must reach the enviable equilibrium and elegance of Asplund’s volumes having a much fatter mass. This mass is the reason for the demolition of the three existing annex buildings. Thought absolutely decent, the existing buildings are impossible to adapt to the new functions and, given their slight differences, will never reach the unity required for the new Library to find a balanced relation with the Asplund building [to relate to the Asplund Library as a whole].
The project immediately becomes a humble and obscure endeavour about proportions, a virtuosic exercise whose ultimate scope is neglect. The new building tries to reach its proper [given] dimensions, through complicate architectural contortions. This desperate and silent exercise discovers a new possible richness for the distribution of program in the new building.
The cruel gymnastic of a compulsory program exercise helps discover a new simplicity in the organization of the library. The distribution of functions according to a given envelope and the necessity to connect the four towers, provide an opportunity to develop a large underground connecting public space.
5.The new Stockholm City Library is made of two buildings. One is the dark yellow block with the large cylindrical dome at the corner between Sveavägen and Odengatan, the other is the ensemble of the four thin slabs and terraces in between, aligned along Odengatan.
The two buildings are connected through escalators enclosed in an air-supported envelope, squeezed between the two buildings. The old building contains the Civic Studies and People and Countries collections and is kept as much as possible as it is. The new one is made of four towers and of a large [25x90 m] semi-underground public room, open 24 hours, climatized in order to provide a crowded public space operating even in cold Scandinavian winters. The public room is the main urban space of the Library [as well as the cylindrical dome will remain the main urban icon of the complex]. The public room is divided into four large indoor terraces, slowly sloping down towards the Asplund building.
The terraces are filled with four different gardens of books, hanging from the ceiling are the fruits of a floating media forest. Above the ceiling are the four towers containing the heavier part of the collections. The gardens of books contain the most popular part of the different collections. The most specific parts are inside of the four towers. There is a vertical thematic correspondence among towers and regions in the gardens: Flemish Painting collection floats over Flemish Painting garden.
The public room is directly entered from Odengatan and from the Asplund building trough escalators and can be reached from the metro station at Odeonplan, passing through parts of the underground spaces of the Diligentia building [these areas can be transformed and used as exhibition spaces].
The three terraces among the towers are pierced by skylights, bringing natural light to the public room.
The new library contains two different kinds of public space: the noisy, crowded, mutating, artificial landscape of the public room and the silent, slow, natural ambient of the four towers and of the terraces open to the hill.
The public room is filled with the flows of people moving from the different regions of the Library, with the random promenades of lazy flaneurs just passing by, with the meetings of kids from the high schools, with the murmured conversations of old philologists having a coffee. The public room is open 24 hours; it contains the enquiries desks for the visitors and the self-service counters for borrowing and returning media, the bars, and the accesses to the towers. The auditoria and studio facilities are grouped around the public room. Crowds move in the public room creating its particular spectacle.
The four towers are the hard-core Library: just dense storages in the middle of each floor, with silent study areas along the wide windows open to the terraces and the hill. Only shelves and desks define the space [as in the Laurenziana, as in Wren’s Trinity College]. Entering the four towers, everyone can sense the vertigo of a lifelong devotion to knowledge. The four towers have almost biblical names: tower one is the tower of nature, tower two is the tower of languages, tower three is the tower of arts, tower four is the tower of fiction.
The underground part of the building is a concrete box; the towers have a steel frame. The long sides of the towers work as large Vierendeel beams, spanning over the public room.
The building is covered with dark grey aluminium panels.
6.The collections displayed in the public room are organized as gardens of books. The gardens of books contain printed material and are made of bookcases 1.40 m high. Bookcases are organized as hedges in an Italian garden; a large green carpet covers pavement. Bookcases define paths and rooms, areas of easy access and hidden oasis of quiet. Over the gardens hangs the media forest: screens, headphones and keyboards allow the media collection of the Library to be reached. Sofas and armchairs and tables are spread all along the gardens. Each terrace has its own bar.
The parts of the collection on display in the gardens change during the year: in October Ptolemaic Physics Revival invades Soviet Science Fiction, in June the David Ricardo festival substitutes Japanese comic art.
The organization of the public room allows imagining the gardens of books as exhibition spaces; in case of need it is possible to move the shelves and leave space for temporary events. The same way the Cortile di Belvedere could host a naumachia, the public room will host concerts, theatre pieces, dances, exhibitions, parties.
The Director of the Library will have the possibility to choose musicians, writers, scientists as curators of the gardens, and collaborate with them in developing a program of activities for the public room.
