National Library of Latvia

Latvians call the building Gaismas pils, the Castle of Light, and the name is far older than the library. Its architect, Gunnar Birkerts, took it from Latvian mythology, together with the image of a glass mountain. The result, on the left bank of the Daugava in Riga, rises in dark steps like a hill: thirteen floors, 68 metres high.

It was a long wait. Talk of a new national library began in 1928. Birkerts, a Latvian-American architect who had emigrated and built his career near Detroit, received the commission in 1989. Construction started in 2008, and the doors opened on 29 August 2014, the library’s 95th birthday. Earlier that year, people formed a human chain to pass selected books from the old building to the new one.

Before the move, the collection was scattered: by 1988 it sat in five buildings across the city. Since 1996 rarely used books have been stored at Silakrogs, outside Riga, in a former Soviet missile bunker that is still in use.

The library’s names follow the country’s history. It opened in 1919, a year after independence, as the State Library, built on the private collection of its first librarian, Jānis Misiņš. Under German occupation it was renamed the Country Library, dropping any hint of a sovereign state. Under Soviet rule, books judged dangerous were withdrawn from 1946 and could be read only with a special permit until 1988. It has been the National Library of Latvia since 1991.

That is the core task of any national library: to keep a country’s printed record whole. Here it also runs Letonica, a national digital library of newspapers, maps, sheet music and sound recordings.