Living Library
The focus of the book Living Library is the Utrecht University Library’s (“UBU”) new building in the Netherlands, designed by Wiel Arets Architect & Associates.
Living Library not only deals with the new building and its use (its collection, contemporary use and future) but includes these themes in a much broader (inter)national perspective as well.
Using interviews, photographs, essays, stills, stories, artworks, statistics, maps, drawings and other images the book addresses these issues from many different points of view. As a result, it is fragmented in character, very diverse and often surprising. Book designer Irma Boom was given the challenging task of merging these fragments into one whole.
The book consists of two interwoven main components. The most extensive one is about the new Utrecht University Library building and the secondary one deals with what can be seen as the ‘inside’ or ‘content’ of this library and libraries in general: use, collection, history, information transfer, cultural importance and ideas about the future of the library in an Internet world. The pages about the building itself are slightly larger and printed on more substantial paper than the pages dealing with library related topics non-specific to Arets’ library in Utrecht. So a quick flip through the book reveals at first sight only the Utrecht University Library building, but by turning the pages one by one everything in between becomes visible as well.
In the pages about the UBU, Irma Boom leads the reader through the building floor by floor, beginning at the entrance and gradually moving to the top. Each floor is shown using various source
UBU Exterior
UBU Interior Foto’s: Henryk Gajewski
materials from photographers Jan Bitter and Bas Princen, filmmaker Henryk Gajewski, architectural drawings and so forth for that floor. This gives the book a very lively image edit. In this component texts about the building are included. Among these are a dialogue between architect Arets and client Savenije, essays about their building by architecture critics Roemer van Toorn and Marc Dubois, an interview with Aryan Sikkema, the University’s building director on his view of the campus as a whole, technical information on the making of the façade and its concrete slabs and the design by Adriaan Geuze’s West 8 for the Library’s courtyard.
The slightly smaller and thinner ‘interior’ pages running throughout the book include interviews by Wiel Arets with other international library builders like Rem Koolhaas, Toyo Ito, Jacques Herzog and Dominique Perrault. Other highlights include Geörgy Konrád’s essay In the Library, which was commissioned and written specifically for this book; a series of photographs of international libraries by the renowned photographer Candida Höfer; works of art related in one way or another to the topic ‘information on the body or on the move’ by Jenny Holzer, Gerald van der Kaap, Aryan Kaganof, David Small and Bettina Rheims; an interview with ‘digital librarian’ Brewster Kahle about the internet as the library of the future, top pieces from the UBU collection and lots of other interesting and little known facts, figures, quotes and images.
Aryan Kaganof ‘Song of Solomon’, in Muti Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (photo guto bussab)
In March 2006 the book was awarded a bronze medal at the international exhibit in Leipzig of The Most beautiful Books in all the world for the year 2005.
Editor: Marijke Beek
Design and image editing: Irma Boom
Research: Eva DeCarlo
Texts: Marijke Beek, Eva DeCarlo
Published by Prestel, Munich, 2005
this article was originally published here
July 20th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Cool stuff. It’s amazing how things go around the world. I got fascinated by the works of Wiel Arets after reading that book.
May 27th, 2010 at 11:16 am
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