Stockholm Public Library

About the Stockholm Library Conceptual Design

This project seeks to understand the material possibilities of the relationship between the planned city and the existing tectonic bodies, by exploring, responding, and affecting space through a distributed system of abstracted interpretations. The urban scale is understood not as the result of the placement of a collection of objects and their residual spaces, but as occurring as the reinterpretation of the interdependencies of the urban and natural fabrics of the city. Additionally, the ambiguous juxtaposition of the current Asplund Library and Library Annexes, to the glacial esker is explored by connecting the two with a folded surface that bridges and inhabits the interstitial spaces of the library structures. This surface creates a new infrastructure which is able to respond to the movement of people between, over around the existing buildings and direct wandering past the buildings up to the observatory.

The new pathways and reinterpretation of exterior building forms allows for variations of spatial experience over time inside the new building. Critical to the experience of the Asplund building is ensuring the central rotunda experience is the same from the entrance at Sveavagen or coming from the new addition. In either case, the level of entry for the Asplund building will be the third floor. In the new additions, effective circulation of books via automated equipment and efficient travel paths for staff are matched with open and visually exciting clusters of reading areas. Zones of public interaction are positioned along the pathways and voids created by varying layers of columns and shifting floor plates that allow for directed movement, play, and exploration.