This is what the new National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague is going to look like when it is completed in 2011.
The design is by Future Systems of London.
“Its unique form and curvature is a reference to baroque buildings in Prague”
The “building is placed on a white unpolished marble platform, with mirror finished stainless steel wings lifted up the perimeter edges to reflect the building from different angles.
It is a green building with:
-carefully controlled natural lighting sufficient for reading during 70% of the library’s open hours;
-natural cooling and warming of incoming air through a thermal labyrinth constructed in the basement walls around the massive underground book storage.
It has sort of a Gehry outside and a Koolhaas inside feel.
This building will surely give Rem Koolhaas’s Seattle Central Library a run for its Modernist money.
These guys are putting the books underground and saving the top floor for a “viewing platform and café with spectacular vistas over Prague.”
The estimated 10 million books the library will hold are stored underground and are “distributed by an Automated Storage and Retrieval System and reach the reader in less than 5 minutes”
Welcome to the Library of the Future.
As the architects note “As Google puts every book on line, we still need places where you can smell ink on paper, explore bindings and share a space with others to whom books, words and ideas matter.”
This is the same reason why bookstores will always be around.