Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart

Stuttgart’s central library begins with a room that has no job. Inside the cube at Mailänder Platz, a space called the heart rises through four floors, lit from above, without shelves, desks or counters. The brief asked for “centredness”, a calm place in a busy city centre, and the architect Eun Young Yi answered with an empty room modelled on the Roman Pantheon.

The books start higher up. From the fifth level, a gallery opens upwards like a funnel, lined only with books and climbed by two spiral staircases. Yi drew it from Étienne-Louis Boullée’s 1785 proposal for a national library in France, turning its sphere into a cube. Noah’s ark and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey were among his other sources.

Outside, the building is a strict square prism, 44 metres on each side and 40 metres high, with nine floors above ground and two below. Its outer skin is a grid of frosted glass blocks in a precast concrete frame, and plan, elevation and section all follow the same 0.97-metre module. Behind it stands a second glass façade, with a walkable space between the two. From the eighth level, a roof terrace looks all the way round the Stuttgart valley.

Yi won the competition in 1999; the building opened on 24 October 2011 and cost about 80 million euros. It replaced the Wilhelmspalais, a former royal residence that had housed the central library since 1965, and now receives almost two million visitors a year. In 2013 the city library was named Germany’s Library of the Year. We use it as the counterpoint to Helsinki in why modern libraries look nothing like old ones.