Alberto Kalach in Mexico City

By Raymund Ryan - 7 January 2010

The great library occupies a potent place in architectural culture. From the private domains of princes and cardinals in Renaissance Europe to the radical public projects of the Enlightenment, to more recent libraries (Asplund’s in Stockholm; Scharoun’s in Berlin; Koolhaas’s in Seattle) in which the book and a place for reading are gathered to monumental civic effect, the library, at it most essential, unites the single book and its single reader with universes of information and systems of knowledge.
A new library in Mexico, the Biblioteca Vasconcelos, is a vast hangar filled with books to be used by all that nation’s citizens. Its architect, Alberto Kalach, who won the commission through an international design competition, alludes to such classic antecedents as the Long Room constructed at Trinity College Dublin in the early 18th century and Étienne-Louis Boullée’s unrealised proposal for a basilica-like Royal Library (1785). Named for the early 20th century intellectual and politician, the Biblioteca Vasconcelos is certainly elongated. Its primary form is a single extruded room 240 metres long. Defying gravity, the books hang exposed from the ceiling.
In the north of this sprawling capital city, the library is adjacent to the Buenavista railway terminal. Formerly occupied by a nursery school, a post office, and an electricity substation, the site has been conceptualised by Kalach and his colleagues in Taller de Arquitectura X not only as the location of the vast new library but as a botanical garden. The concrete monoliths of the building’s portal frame align about a single, axial hall perpendicular to the main thoroughfare. From this haven floored in white-veined, dark grey marble, library users can stroll out to an evocative, semi-wild garden with several small hills, an ornamental pond, and three satellite pavilions.
The linear plan divides into three contiguous sectors. On the exterior, service cores, clad in translucent glass planks, read as...