2006 Stockholm, Sweden

Isohypses - Stockholm public library

Responsible author Joseph Di Pasquale; Partners Andrea Aimone, Mihran Rovelli Manoukian, Paola Sacchi

Listening to the music of this place we saw silvered glass isohypses coming out from the hill moving windingly towards the street. Steady and silent like spaces for libraries should be. We desired to enter and live inside of them: we used them as shelter where we could read and study away from the rest of the world, suspended in the geological instant when these protrusions coming from the hill have been formed.
But they are also moving imperceptibly, silently they change their shape as mountains and glaciers, the same way knowledge grows throughout the years. During the night they pulse of light, during the day they catch the sun warming and lighting the deep secrets of the knowledge they generously preserve.
We would like for people to enter into it often, just for a walk, or to take a coffee and to speak with each other below the glazed street-hall. We would like students to pass through these spaces to go to university, we wish that the new library can become part of everyday’s city experience. We see families using this place to reach the terrace and the park, we see sweethearts walking through their emotions and dining by candlelight admiring the city. We would like children to discover Asplund’s library’s beauty by playing and studying and learning about architecture. We would like Stockholm’s citizens to love this building born from the bowels of their city, and then to forget the time when it was built and start considering it as if it had always been there, as a natural element, as the mountains and the lakes of their country. It couldn’t be anywhere else than right there, it couldn’t be anything else than what it is: a non-building grown up among buildings which made it become a building while encountering life and time.


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