Beautiful Libraries Around the World

Some libraries are worth a detour for the room alone. A baroque hall in a monastery, a nineteenth-century reading room under an iron and glass roof, a glazed civic building where the stairs are full of people: each is beautiful for a different reason, and the reasons are more interesting than any ranking.

What follows is a tour rather than a league table. We describe these buildings in the terms they are widely known by, without inventing dates, architects or visitor figures.

What makes a library beautiful

Three things recur in the rooms people travel to see.

Light. Almost every celebrated reading room is organised around how daylight enters it, whether through clerestory windows, a glazed vault, a lantern above a central void or a fully transparent façade. Reading needs light, and the architecture of libraries is largely the history of getting it to a table.

Vertical space. A tall room with galleries lets a large collection stand around a single volume of air, so a reader can see the whole extent of what is held. It is practical, and it produces the effect visitors describe as being inside the collection rather than beside it.

Books as surface. Where the spines form the walls, the room takes its colour and texture from the collection itself. That is why the shelving in the great historic halls reads as material rather than as furniture, and why contemporary buildings that hide their books entirely can feel oddly anonymous.

The historic halls

Europe’s monastic and university libraries are the origin of the picture most people have in mind. The Long Room at Trinity College Dublin is a barrel-vaulted hall lined with galleried shelving and marble busts. The Biblioteca Joanina in Coimbra is a gilded baroque interior of carved wood and painted ceilings. The abbey libraries of Admont in Austria and Sankt Gallen in Switzerland put frescoes, stucco and white and gold joinery around collections assembled over centuries. The Strahov library in Prague is remembered for its painted theological and philosophical halls.

Several of these are now visited as monuments, with the books protected and the room ticketed. That changes what they are, but not what they show: a period in which a library was a treasure room, and its decoration was an argument about the value of what it held. Library Architecture traces how that plan worked and why it was abandoned.

The great civic reading rooms

A second family arrived with the public library movement and the industrial nineteenth century, when iron, glass and generous public money produced reading rooms on a new scale. The Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, the historic reading rooms of the Bibliothèque nationale de France with their slender iron columns and glazed domes, and the round reading room built for the British Museum library in London all belong to it.

Their intent is different from the monastic hall. These rooms were built for readers in numbers, and the grandeur is addressed to the public rather than to a collection’s owner. Sitting in one is the point, which is why they remain the standard for what a reading room should feel like.

Rooms that surprise you

Some celebrated libraries are memorable for one unrepeatable idea. The Real Gabinete Português de Leitura in Rio de Janeiro packs a neo-Manueline reading room with tiers of dark shelving under a stained-glass skylight. The George Peabody Library in Baltimore stacks five galleried tiers of cast iron around a narrow atrium. The library of the Escorial in Spain runs a long vaulted hall of painted ceiling above shelving that faces the wall.

More recent buildings do the same trick with different means. Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City suspends its stacks in bays along a long glazed hall, so the collection appears to hang above the visitor. The Tianjin Binhai library in China wraps a spherical auditorium in undulating white terraces of shelving. Seattle’s central library folds a faceted glass and steel skin around a continuous spiralling ramp of shelves. Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt tilts a vast circular reading room towards the Mediterranean under a sloping glazed roof.

The new civic living rooms

The most recent group is designed around people first. Oodi in Helsinki is the standard reference: a curved building of wood and glass beside the Finnish parliament, with workshops, studios and equipment below and the collection on the top floor under a softly lit ceiling. Stuttgart’s city library takes the opposite formal route, a strict white cube around a tall stepped void, and arrives at a similar result: a room whose subject is the space in the middle.

These buildings are beautiful in a quieter way than a baroque hall, and they are doing more jobs at once. What those jobs are is the subject of The Modern Library.

Beauty is not only in the famous ones

The libraries people love are usually not on any list. A branch with a good children’s corner, a hillside village reading room, a bookmobile that arrives on Thursdays, a converted telephone box with forty paperbacks in it. None of them photographs like a painted ceiling, and all of them do the thing a library exists to do. Types of Libraries covers the whole range, including the small and mobile forms.

If you plan to visit any of the famous rooms, check the terms before you travel. Some are working libraries you can walk into, some require a reader’s card, and some are visitor attractions where the collection is behind glass. The reading room you can actually sit in is usually the better experience, and often it is the one nearest to you. Other places worth the journey are collected in Libraries of the World.