Not so long ago a trip to the library was considered something exciting that adults and children looked forward to. But the smart phone ended that. It also ended a lot of social interaction between real people face to face. In china they feel that one real good way to get people reading and interacting with one another in person is through seriously updating their National Libraries.
In the town of Tianjin near Beijing they updated their library making it one the most impressive libraries in the entire world. It literally redefines the words ‘public library’! The people who led the project said: “We came to the conclusion that in a generation where technology sprouts like mushrooms after the rain we need a response that will especially get our youth excited to encourage them to leave their smart phones and get more and more interested in books and reading.”
So how do you do it? In Tianjin they hired a special architectural firm from Holland called MVRDV which created a library that looks like the human eye and is 34,000 square meters which is 365,972.9 square feet! The project leaders explain: “Before embarking on this project we asked a lot of youth in a survey what they’d like to see in a library and according to their answers and other surveys we decided that in addition to a great hall with over a million books in it, to add more advanced computer rooms and meeting rooms and rooms where youth can actually sing and record themselves. It took 3 years to build but it was worth every minute!”
See the pictures and decide for yourself!
Photos from MVRDV
