Vasconcelos Library

Biblioteca Vasconcelos is a library you look up into. Its steel bookshelves hang in tiers inside a vast hollow atrium, crossed by walkways, so the collection seems to float above the people below. The Mexican architects Alberto Kalach and Juan Palomar designed it, and at least one critic has read the space as an ark, a vessel built to carry knowledge. At the centre is Ballena (Whale), a sculpture by Gabriel Orozco.

The press called it the Megabiblioteca. It covers 38,000 square metres in the Buenavista neighbourhood, next to the station where the Metro, the suburban railway and the Metrobús meet. Its name honours José Vasconcelos, the philosopher who once headed the National Library of Mexico.

The opening was political. President Vicente Fox inaugurated the library on 16 May 2006, a week before his deadline for promoting his government’s work ahead of that year’s presidential election, and predicted it would be talked about around the world. In March 2007 it closed because of construction defects. Federal auditors found 36 irregularities, including marble blocks put in the wrong place at a cost of 15 million pesos. After 22 months and further public money, it reopened in November 2008.

A story that the building inspired the tesseract scene in the film Interstellar has never been confirmed. The stacks are the real draw, and they appear in our tour of beautiful libraries around the world and in why modern libraries look nothing like old ones.