With its simple geometry and classical arrangement, Stockholm’s Public Library is a difficult building to characterize. Designed by Gunnar Asplund during the 1920s, the library is the manifestation of a transitionary period in both the rationale of its designer and the shifting values of European architecture. The ultimate result is a synthesis of styles presented in a visually straightforward package: the fading influence of Neoclassicism juxtaposed against the emergence of Rationalism.
Asplund’s design for the Stockholm Public Library was, at first, purely traditional, with a coffered dome, porticoed entry, and lavish exterior wall treatments more suited to a palazzo than a 20th Century library in Scandinavia. The layout of this scheme was essentially retained but, in Modernist fashion, was distilled down to its most primitive geometric elements: a cylinder emerging from a rectilinear box. The walls are finished in stucco, allowing the formal purity of the structure to maintain its full visual impact on visitors and passers-by.
Visitors to the library ascend (process up) a staircase and through an Egyptian-style doorway into the library’s main space: the reading room. Occupying the central cylinder, the reading room is a cavernous space ringed with three terraced levels of open shelving. Above the book stacks, the roughly stuccoed walls rise the full height of the cylinder, with light streaming in from a ring of windows near the flat ceiling.
More info: https://www.archdaily.com/92320/ad-classics-stockholm-public-library-gunnar-asplund
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