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Over the last years in New York, the Robin Hood Foundation and city’s schools administration have constructed art libraries in 62 schools. Some of the libraries and those recently created at three schools in the Bronx have also appear with the addition of art works by well-known artists. In the picture, left, an art work at P.S. 47 by the illustrator Maira Kalman.

“I go to museums all over the world, and I love natural-history displays, and I wanted something that felt like that,” said Ms. Kalman

Another view of the installation, which Ms. Kalman said was intended to conjure the kind of eccentric personal museums that amateur scientists and collectors once built as a means of cataloging the world.

Some of the objects in the installation include a lump of unformed glass, a giant 1,000-watt light bulb and a fake coconut cake with a cherry on top. The library at P.S. 47 was designed by the architect Richard H. Lewis.

This library is called P.S. 96, and the design firm Pentagram helped find artists willing to donate time and resources to create outsize pieces that ring the rooms.

At P.S. 69, Christoph Niemann has designed a mural that uses images of books serving as almost everything — as Abraham Lincoln’s beard and Mona Lisa’s smile, as a car hood, an eagle’s wings and a dinosaur’s teeth — all organized with Dewey Decimal System numbers in painted bubbles.

I present you a fantastic structure located in Spain, the Espacio de las Artes at Santa Cruz, Tenerife. The building has urban beauty and generates a triangular plaza. Along the facade, over 1,200 openings in 720 different shapes filter the natural light to the inside, while generating an amazing view during night.

The structure features a public library, a contemporary art museum, the Photography Centre of the Tenerife Island, a store, a cafe/restaurant and several public use spaces for the community.

During the grand opening,  this building will change the image of Tenerife, and along with the Calatrava auditorium will turn the city into a cultural focus.

Photographs by Iwan Baan:

Chongquing is large region in China comprising 30 million inhabitants and more than 3,000 years of history. Chongqing, often called “mountain city” for its majestic natural features and geography, develop a world-class library.

The library structure has a concert hall, gallery space, conference facilities, restaurant, and a hotel for visiting scholars.

The building is covered almost entirely in glass, providing transparency for the functions inside and reinforcing the notion that knowledge and ideas must be shared.

The building is organized around a central courtyard form, which is a motif found throughout Chinese architectural tradition. This courtyard, however, is formed one level below the street and is an open-air landscaped forest, providing a green oasis in the middle of one of China’s fastest growing cities.

Turku is a post-modern city in Finland and today the city has a new library to celebrate for! The new city library in Turku is located at the historical centre of the city. The building is the latest addition to a block with the old library and several other historically valuable buildings.

The library has a functionally clear design. The public spaces are situated mainly on two floors surrounding the opening to the courtyard. The staff premises are located systematically on one side of the building facing the street. The first floor has a reception and lounge area, a children’s and youth section.

The building was made from concrete cast on site and fair-faced concrete was formed with vertical boards to achieve the rough feeling characteristic of the material. Glass was given a seminal role both in the outer architecture and the interior world. Transparency befits this type of building; a public library building should evoke the idea of openness.

This glass salon has the functionality of a reading room and exhibition space in the Lounge Founders of the National Library in Chile. The salon is surrounded by silkscreen chosen by the Library.

The silkscreen has two sides of the element, with text that enable its reading on both sides, which gives a more ambiguous character as a fabric.

The glass salon is divided into two areas, exhibition space and reading space. This generates into the visitor a better predisposition before accessing the study area.

The project is fantastic because maintains the morphology of the living room in the Library. Also is cultural and gives to the students cosy, warm place with great lighting atmosphere, where to spend their studies and researches.

This Civic Centre is located in Custoias, Portugal, built in a central garden with imposing trees. It was even built a small structure near by it, the local public library.

 

The Civic Centre has two buildings- Cultural & Social. It intends through a multimedia zone in the first floor and leisure zone in the ground floor.

 

Colour play main part and its definition was influenced by Mark Pathko. There were used chromatic gradiations in grey scale on the outside and colour gradations on the inside.

 

The construction materials were chosen according to their ability to create uniform spaces and deduct detail and visual elements to the building. The exterior walls finishing are smooth, the windows are glued glass in stainless steel, custom made, which makes the frames disappear on the outside. Interior doors are made with the same plasterboard used in the walls and the floors have a concrete floor leveler that combines with the concrete ceiling.

 

This is an absolutely fantastic art center located in Santo Domingo, Colombia and is real future of post-apocalyptic architecture to look like. The design of the center invites everyone. Inside is most modern cultural showcases, with sharp angles and the inoffensive use of white paint and pale woods.

In this superb architecture building visitors can find a library, cafe and restaurant, bars and many many spacious rooms with elements of art all over.

Architect Giancarlo Mazzanti distribute the obtrusive and predictable rearrangements of glass, steal and concrete phallic references with this organically inspired beacon of grounded, yet ethereal modernity.

Celebrating nature’s beauty and remindingof the impermanence of most man-made structures, this design invites everyone closer without the subconscious feeling you are merely a visitor in someone else’s domain.

‘Sendai Mediatheque‘ is a center for activities in the field of art and film, also serving as a public facility to help people freely exchange information with each other through various media and learn how to use information correctly. The centre is located in Sendai the capital city of Miyagi Prefecture, Japan and it is also the largest city in the Tohoku.

Inside the building is lovely and spacious. The sunlight shines every day through the huge class walls. This insure to visitors comfort and enjoying the street pageant. To established the maximize comfort there are many sophisticated designed furniture produced by very famous designer like Karim Rashid, who was responsible for the wonderful bench on the 6^th floor, also the chair by Yoshiaki Tetsuka on the 5^th floor, and the amazing ‘Flower Chairs’ designed by Kazuyo Sejima on the 2^nd floor.

They inspire the sense of the users, and make the atmosphere and design more friendly and familiar for visitors. The lighting and meeting rooms are also constructed for the user and the environment.
Sendai Mediatheque has become a significant place in the city, and it will continuingly show Sendai is a progressive city of art and culture to the citizens and the visitors.

Tama Art University Library is located in Hachioji City, Tokyo, Japan. The architecture and the interior design is created by Toyo Ito & Associates.

When you entered through the entrance gate, you’ll surounded from a front garden with small and large trees. A few steps forward will bring you into the existing cafeteria, which is sole place in the university shared by both students to spend their time waiting for the bus in the library.

If you want to climbing the stairs to the second floor, you’ll find large art books on low bookshelves crossing under the arches. Between these shelves are study desks of various sizes. A large table with a copy machine allows users to do professional editing work.

The library is an interactive place where everyone can discover their own style of arts with books and film media, as you was walking through a deep forest or in a deep cave.

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The Seattle Library is one of the greatest, spacious and educational library in the whole world. This library is a marvel of modern architecture. This library is made of glass and steel and the designers are Rem Koolhas and Joshua Ramus.Inside the public library can hold about 1, 45 million books and other materials, features underground public parking for 143 vehicles.

Enter from Fifth Avenue, the upper part of the slope, and you are in the Living Room—one of the most exhilarating public rooms in the nation. Facing south, the light-infused atrium rises up eight stories.There are information and circulation desks, self-check stations, a bank of computers, and a large number of surprisingly comfortable cubist chairs.

At the back of the Living Room is the Starbucks Teen Center, a reference desk and a bank of computers with a limited book collection. While set apart through color and other design elements, it remains very open to the larger Living Room. A different model than most teen spaces, it’s more an entry point to the building than a room unto itself.

As great a building as this is for Seattle’s readers and researchers, learners and dreamers, its impact is even bigger.

The Seattle Central Library is the flagship library of the Seattle Public Library system. The 11-story (185 feet or 56 meters high) glass and steel building in downtown Seattle,Washington was opened to the public on Sunday, May 23,2004. Situated on a sloping site between 4th and 5th street the new library will have entrances on both street levels. The entrance level on 4th Street, one of Seattle’s main thoroughfares, houses the Children’s Library and foreign-language resources. Rem Koolhaas is the architect.

Unlike traditional libraries, Seattle Central Library is organized into spatial compartments that are dedicated to and equipped for specific duties. Each platform is a programmatic cluster that is architecturally defined and equipped for maximum performance. The spaces between the platforms function as trading floors where librarians inform and stimulate. The eleven-level Seattle Library is wrapped in a diamond-shaped curtain wall that folds and cantilevers onto the street. The diagonal structural grid of the curtain wall acts as a seismic brace and resists wind load. Steel mesh within the glazing reduces heat and glare.
The grid’s diamonds are seven feet at their tallest and four feet at their widest. They are installed in 80-by-12-foot sections, the largest that could be trucked on Interstate 5. On the outside of the grid, the building will be sheathed in double- and triple-glazed windows manufactured by the German firm Seele.

Color is used to define different interior functions. Against the black ceiling and grey interior palette, these colored areas are great wayfinding devices – such as the illuminated, bright yellow acrylic panels for the escalators and lifts. The black ceiling also accentuates the vertical nature of large public gathering spaces. Sandwiched between the grand plaza and reference area are the closed meeting rooms, defined by the red floor and curved walls and ceiling.
The $10.9 million branch has an updated collection and the capacity to hold 66,700 books and materials. Highlights include materials related to the local maritime and fishing industry, and a world languages collection that contains books, tapes, newspapers and magazines in languages other than English. The new branch has self-checkout stations, 38 computers (up from 13), underground parking, a special area for teens, and a meeting room. The children’s area in the prominent northwest corner overlooks the future municipal park space. Through a child’s eye, the skewed concrete columns on the first floor will seem playful. “From every vantage point it looks different”, said Jay Taylor of Magnusson Klemencic Associates. “The different orientation could really make a magical space.”

Salt Lake City is the capital and the most populous city of the U.S. state of Utah. The name of the city is often shortened to Salt Lake, or its initials, S.L.C. It was originally known as Great Salt Lake City. The Salt Lake City Public Library is a system of free public libraries. There are six locations: the main library downtown, the Anderson-Foothill branch, the Chapman branch in Glendale, the Day-Riverside branch in Rose Park, the Sprague branch in Sugar House, and the Corrine & Jack Sweet branch in the Avenues.

This 200,000-square-foot facility is part of an ambitious program by the library to double its space for collections, establish a landmark in the city’s civic core, and create a lively interactive public space currently missing in the downtown area. The new library features a triangular main building, adjacent rectangular administration building, glass-enclosed “urban room”, and public piazza. The new Salt Lake City Library is a splendid addition to the downtown area, and it has won several architecture awards. The gradually rising outer wall is both striking and functional, housing a study area, which is connected to the main building by walkways over the atrium. Also highly functional is the raised access floor covered with modular carpet. The library’s underground parking facility can be accessed by turning mid-block from eastbound 400 South. Parking in this facility is free for the first half-hour, then 75 cents per half-hour after that.
Natural light is introduced into all of the spaces where people sit and work. Infused with light from all sides, the library has paid careful attention to ensure that library materials and technology are not affected by direct sunlight. The clear glass on the lens of the triangle has the highest UV rating available for energy efficiency.

Library patrons expressed the desire for even more from the City Library collections - a request that challenged the library to provide more depth and enlarge both the scope and breadth of the collections. For the past three years, collection development librarians have selected and acquired more than 80,000 new items. This brings the collection size for the new Main Library close to 500,000 items and the total library system collection to 750,000. Library materials now include not only books, but audio cassettes, compact discs, videocassettes, DVDs, and CD-Roms, in addition to visual materials such as art prints and slides. The technology center and training lab offer 42 computer stations with Internet access; an additional 121 Internet computers are located throughout the building. The computers in the technology center have been partially provided through a Gates grant, and staff is available to assist users as they write papers, work on resumes, and develop computer skills.