Czech Library
Prague, Czech Republic | 2006
[international competition]

As both a secure repository of books and a symbolic civic building, a national library must negotiate the spatial dichotomy between storage and display. Through a strategy of 'light monumentality' the book stacks are formed into a curved two-way truss that protects and defines a public winter-garden below it. During the day, its specular surface reflects the surrounding cityscape, while at night an internal illumination reveals the massive amount of books and knowledge within. The curved form itself organizes a system of ramped stacks and reading rooms that allow new interactive relationships between books and their viewers.