Location: Caen, France.

Architect: OMA – Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

The Bibliothèque Alexis de Tocqueville is a public library located in Normandy, France. The 12,000 m2 multimedia library is situated at the tip of a peninsula that extends out from the city of Caen to the English Channel. The library’s glass facade visually connects the adjacent park, pedestrian pathway, and waterfront plaza to the interior, enabling a fluid interaction of the library with its surroundings. The building’s cross-shaped design responds to the urban context, with each of the four protruding planes of the cross pointing to a landmark point in Caen. The four planes, each housing a pedagogic discipline, meet in a large reading room on the first floor, encouraging maximum flow between the departments. The library’s design is an opposition between mass and void, with public space at the core of the design. The entrance level on the ground floor contains a large open space with a press kiosk, an auditorium with 150 seats, an exhibition space, and a restaurant with an outdoor terrace on the waterfront. The first floor contains a large variety of work and reading spaces and 120,000 documents, with physical and digital books placed side-by-side in the bookshelves. The digital extension of the physical collections, integrated within the bookshelves, is one of the new multimedia features of the library. The top floor of the library is occupied by a space for children, as well as offices and logistics. The archive and special historical collections are stored in safe and dry conditions in the concrete basement, protected from the surrounding water by an innovative waterproof membrane applied on the inner side of the concrete walls.

Photo credit: Delfino Sisto Legnani, Marco Cappelletti, Courtesy of OMA.