Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Bibliotheca Alexandrina was built to answer a loss. It stands on the Mediterranean shore of Alexandria, close to where the ancient Library of Alexandria stood before it vanished in antiquity, and it carries that library’s name in Latin.

The main reading room is the reason to go. It spreads over 20,000 square metres on eleven cascading levels, and when it was built no reading room in the world was larger. Above it, a glass-panelled roof some 160 metres across rises to 32 metres and tilts towards the sea like a sundial. Outside, a wall of grey granite is carved with characters from 120 scripts, designed by the Norwegian artist Jorunn Sannes.

In 1974 a committee of Alexandria University chose a plot between its campus and the sea. UNESCO joined the project and in 1988 ran the design competition, which the Norwegian office Snøhetta won from more than 500 entries. Construction began in 1995, and the complex was inaugurated on 16 October 2002.

Shelves are quicker to build than to fill. There is room for eight million books, but at the opening the library held about 500,000, and critics called it a vanity project that spent on architecture what it should have spent on books. A gift of another 500,000 volumes from the Bibliothèque nationale de France followed, and acquisitions still depend on donations. The Internet Archive gave 10 billion web pages from more than 16 million sites, a digital library of the web itself.

In 2011, when the building closed during the Egyptian revolution, young people formed a circle around it to keep looters away. Students from nearby universities make up four in five of its readers.