Tianjin Binhai Library

Tianjin Binhai Library is known as The Eye. A large luminous sphere sits at its centre, and from the park outside you see it through an eye-shaped opening in the façade, like an iris. Around it, white terraces of shelving climb from floor to ceiling in waves. The sphere itself is an auditorium for 110 people.

The library is one of the five main attractions of the Binhai Cultural Center. It was designed by MVRDV, the Rotterdam architects, with a local team from the Tianjin Urban Planning and Design Institute. The local government set a tight schedule, and the project went from first drawings to open doors in three years. It opened in October 2017, and in its first week around 10,000 people came each day, enough to form queues outside.

The terraces have room for 1.2 million books, yet the main atrium cannot store any. Because the library was finished in a hurry, and in conflict with what had been officially approved, the rooms that should have given access to the upper tiers were never built. For the opening-day photographs, book spines were printed onto the backs of the shelves. In the atrium, the wall of books that made the library famous is scenery rather than storage.

The reading happens elsewhere. The first and second floors hold mainly lounges and reading rooms; above them are computer rooms, meeting rooms and offices, and there are two roof terraces. In all, the building covers 33,700 square metres over five levels.

Tianjin belongs in our tour of beautiful libraries around the world, with a reminder that a photograph of shelves is not a collection.