Tianjin Binhai Library, interior view; photo © Ossip van Duivenbode

Tianjin Binhai Library by MVRDV. Is this the library of the future?

A gigantic eye lies in the middle of the futuristic cave-like atrium of MVRDV’s new Tianjin Binhai Library. Completed in 2017, the new 33,700-square-meter / 362,000-square-foot library was built as the centerpiece of a larger urban development project comprising four other cultural buildings in the city of Tianjin, Northern China.

The library is a 5-story introverted building in which a cascade of terraced shelves encompasses a large diaphanous sphere, 21 meters / 69 feet across. Dubbed The Eye, the sphere contains an 82-seat auditorium whose external LED-panel-covered skin transforms into a large multimedia facade cyclically.

The terraced space is the library’s main reading room and book storage area and may contain up to 1,2 million volumes, together with lounge area for socialization and seating spaces from which to contemplate the jaw-dropping architecture around.

Interior views of the atrium of the Tianjin Binhai Library; photos © Ossip van Duivenbode

The main reading room is topped by an oculus-like circular skylight that reinforces the impression that the MVRDV building has something in common with a Baroque church in which the oculus crowns a concave space, as in Borromini’s Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome. *

The dome of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza by Francesco Borromini (1642-1660); photo Architas.

Such similarity is further strengthened by another strange circumstance; like in the Trompe-l’œil optical illusions of which Italian Mannerist and Baroque churches are plenty, the volumes on the upper shelves are actually images printed on aluminum panels, intended to “represent” real books that can’t be there simply because those shelves are inaccessible.

Indeed, the Dutch firm complains that the Tianjin Binhai Library does not completely conform to the original design: “The tight construction schedule forced one essential part of the concept to be dropped: access to the upper bookshelves from rooms placed behind the atrium. This change was made locally and against MVRDV’s advice. It rendered access to the upper shelves impossible. The full vision for the Tianjin Library may yet be realized.” MVRDV says.

The upper shelves do not contain real books but fake ones printed on perforated aluminum panels; photos © Ossip van Duivenbode and Design Asia.

Another difference between the original project and the realized building is that the “The Eye” was initially conceived as a giant spherical mirror aimed to create a complex visual interplay with the architecture of the atrium, while the one realized is a sort of enormous ostrich egg which, when (luckily rarely) mapped with videos and colorful digital patterns, makes the whole atrium vaguely resemble a 1970s disco club.

In MVRDV’s original design, the “Eye” auditorium was wrapped by a mirror ball, while in the built library its is enclosed by a much less fascinating LED-screen-covered multimedia envelope.

Images MVRDV and Design Asia.

Together with the large atrium space, the building also contains secondary reading rooms, educational facilities, book storage, archives, meeting rooms, offices, and a media center.

The concept on which MVDRV’s design was based is that a modern library should be, together with (more than?) a space for silence and introspection, also a place for socialization and sharing.

“The Eye is the center of the library. It ‘hollows out’ the building and creates, out of bookshelves, an environment to sit, to read, to hang out, to climb and to access, to create an organic social space” Winy Maas.

Functional diagram of the lower part of the atrium and a view of the terraced shelves; images MVRDV and © Ossip van Duivenbode

Overall, though visually outstanding and masterfully modeled, this library confirms a tendency to vain monumentalism quite common in many projects of large public buildings these days, especially in the Far and the Middle East but also in the United States and Europe (see the Library of Birmingham, for example).

Does it really make sense to build in a 12-million-inhabitant megalopolis an enormous library, people will possibly enter more to admire the building than to read books; wouldn’t it be better to create twenty smaller district libraries instead?

The great quality of MVRDV’s architectural design is not in discussion and I am pretty sure that, if fully completed, this building would have got that balance between form and function it partially lacks. Yet, more than “the library of the future”, as someone defined it, this building looks more a mausoleum, a colossal funerary monument in memory of the book.

What is a library today? Can its stunning architecture be more important than the books it contains? Image Design Asia.

* The Tianjin Binhai Library is plenty of references to the work of architects of the past, especially of the 18th century; from the Theater of Besançon by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux with its famous “Eye” conceptual drawing to which the sphere by MVRDV, framed by the facade eyelid-like opening, is arguably an allusion; to the globe of the Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton by Étienne-Louis Boullée.

In the project by Winy Maas, who supervised the design of the library for MVRDV, we can also see more “pop” elements. I am the only one to whom the terraced atrium evokes the scene of Spielberg’s “Riders of the Lost Ark” in which the fire blasts the Ark of the Covenant’s lid into the sky opening a circular shockwave in the clouds? Or, maybe, Maas’ memory still contains some images of the nuclear tests of the Cold War. I could go on indefinitely, since architecture has always been an interplay between past and present, after all.

Étienne-Louis Boullée, Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton, 1784; image: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, “Eye Enclosing the Theatre at Besançon”, c. 1800.

The main facade of the Tianjin Binhai Library (photo © Ossip van Duivenbode)

How much contemporary architecture has been influenced by pop culture? Top to bottom: a still from Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), a screenshot from Soviet video footage of the Tsar bomb explosion (1961), and a view of MVRDV’s Tianjin Binhai Library (photo © Ossip van Duivenbode).

Tianjin Binhai Library, conceptual diagram, longitudinal cross-section, and second-floor plan; images MVRDV

Interior views of the auditorium, and the main reading room; photos © Ossip van Duivenbode