BARCELONA — Since opening in this Spanish city in May 2022, the Gabriel García Márquez library, a public facility specializing in Latin American literature, has become the talk of the town and one of the city’s architectural showpieces.
Residents of a city replete with Art nouveau and innovative buildings have alternately dubbed it a “new icon,” a “cathedral of books” and even “neighborhood Guggenheim,” referring to the modern art museum in Bilbao.
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Last year it was named Best New Public Library in the world at the 88th World Library and Information Conference in Rotterdam, and it won design prizes such as the FAD prize, the Premio Ciutat de Barcelona, the COAM first prize and the NAN prize. But what makes a local library in the district of Sant Martí de Provençals so special?
Bright and elevated
SUMA architects, which competed for the project in 2015, love its playful, sculptural quality and block-like structure meant to evoke piles of books. The premises extend over 4,000 square meters and five floors, allowing visitors to explore a multiplicity of spaces and cozy corners integrated through their connection with a central, open atrium or foyer.
The general feel is bright and imposing, for this central space (or Spiral of Encounters) is lit from above. At the same time it is warm, thanks to the extensive and visible presence of wood, materials and furnishings specifically designed to enhance user comfort.
The building sits on a rounded, slightly elevated platform that helps fluid pedestrian circulation around it, effectively merging with the surrounding tree-lined streets. The city has renamed the spot Carmen Balcells square, to honor the Catalan literary agent that helped publish and catapult to fame García Márquez and other Latin American authors.
A new library function
The architects, Guillermo Sevillano and his partner Elena Orte, say their building is a “people’s palace,” following a definition given by the U.S. sociologist Eric Klinenberg for buildings that represent, beyond their functionality, “infrastructures of social proximity and cohesion.”
They thus redefined this space around a holistic relationship between building, contents, staff and visitors.
Before starting the construction, SUMA examined what a library means and what its purpose is in the age of digital supremacy and the decline of the written page. They thus redefined this space around a holistic relationship between building, contents, staff and visitors, to provide a physical experience that is unrelated to, and thus not threatened by, our digital habits.
Its spaces include the Agora-Showcase, meant to receive all visitors, and an Ideas Forum, where smaller meeting spaces can be partly enclosed in see-through curtains. Its Reading Palace offers users a personal reading experience, choice of sofas and a homely feel, while balconies and a winter garden allow for ventilation.
The various levels are organized in such a way as to confine noisy activities to the lower floors, and silence and reading areas nearer the top. The first floor is thus for children and families, and the lower-ground floor hosts a local radio station and neighborhood meeting space.
Too popular already?
All these spaces are effectively united through the central, triangular atrium or foyer that is visible through a wooden skeleton, and by ‘hanging’ stairways. It’s a half-open space that is unified yet diverse, both visually and functionally. Wood was the building’s choice material, making this five times lighter than a concrete building, and saving energy in construction. The architects used other, recycled materials in their “ecosystemic” project.
It has fully achieved its intended, positive social and psychological effect as a community center.
Orte and Sevillano are specialists in design structures, and the building is pioneering for its structural use of wood and reinforced steel, invisible joints (in spite of subsequent problems that have required repairs).
Beyond the structure, it has fully achieved its intended, positive social and psychological effect as a community center. Indeed, as local papers report, it has become so popular and received so many “library tourists,” it now has a problem with crowds.
