The largest climatized reading space

https://www.snohetta.com/projects/beijing-city-library

by geox • 2 years ago

87 79 2 years ago

lisper2• 2 years ago

How ironic that this is in China where what you are and are not allowed to read is strictly controlled by the government. Indeed, if I posted this comment while in that library, I would very likely be arrested.

nicolas_t• 2 years ago

It’s been illuminating seeing the hong kong public library « harmonized » after the national security law. No books criticizing the cpp are allowed nowadays.

You won’t find cartoons by Zunzi anymore nor will you find back issues of Apple Daily. The entire political history of hong kong as recorded by published media has been sanitized to ensure that the overly sensitive overlords find nothing that might prick their ego.

So it doesn’t matter if the public library is a nice space with good architecture and a comfortable reading space. If only the official sanctioned viewpoints are available then it fails at the real objective of libraries: To allow people to enrich their mind by giving them multiple viewpoints so that they may forge their own opinions.

dudisubekti• 2 years ago

You could just bring your own book you downloaded with VPN and read it there.

Having a public reading space is always nice

sandspar9• 2 years ago

Only the official sanctioned viewpoints are available on all of our current LLM chatbots, and yet we still enjoy them and find use in them.

Aunche• 2 years ago

Contrary to popular belief, China does not give a damn about what any random particular individual reads or even writes. It's not exactly an efficient use of resources to jail everyone who says something they find objectionable on the Internet. China's censorship and punishment mostly aims at maintaining the legitimacy of the Communist Party.

lisper2• 2 years ago

Contrary to popular belief, China does not give a damn about what any random particular individual reads or even writes.

Try to get through Chinese immigration wearing a T-shirt that says "Tienanmen Square 1989" or "Free Tibet" and I'll bet you will find that they care quite a lot.

emsixteen• 2 years ago

This is ironic in the same way that Alanis Morissette's song is.

Beautiful space. I'm sure it's a great place to spend some time.

paganel2• 2 years ago

There are lots of books that don't get published in ideologically-controlled Western countries anymore.

For example trying to write a balanced biography of the military leader that got us (Romania) into WW2 [1] alongside the Germans has become next to impossible, you'd risk breaking several anti-genocide laws. That was not the case before our accession into the NATO and EU ideological structures (the mid-2000s).

What's funny is that the one biography of Antonescu [2] that is not entirely about how "he was a very bad genocidaire" has been written by a person of Jewish ethnicity at a very small printing house (almost self-published), I guess the powers that be thought that it would have looked bad were they to go after a Jewish person who had tried to be impartial to Antonescu.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Antonescu

[2] https://www.libris.ro/maresalul-ion-antonescu-o-biografie-te...

n4r98• 2 years ago

That's a little vague. Do you have examples of banned biographies, and the reasons given for the bannings?

sandspar9• 2 years ago

You can't read whatever you want in America either, yet we still have bookstores. The Chinese government controls a handful of things very tightly and is laissez-faire about many other things. Also you wouldn't be arrested. Chinese people aren't automatons. They know how to get around silly rules, just like we do.

hereme8883• 2 years ago

What? I've never read a law passed by Congress that makes any reading material illegal.

Are you referring to the inappropriate sexual books pandered to little children in schools?

l3mure• 2 years ago

Some of the tentacles of Total Literary Awareness have been unraveled by literary historian Claire Culleton. Delving into the Bureau’s 234-page file on commercial publisher Henry Holt, she uncovers evidence of Hoover’s “custodial relationship” with the pillars of the Cold War book market.
Holt employees sent the Bureau all manner of literary foreknowledge, from book proposals to page proofs to advance copies—so much material that an editorial staffer wrote Hoover with the news that “I am beginning to feel like a member of the FBI myself.”
Predictably, Hoover and his ghostwriters were asked to provide blurbs for The Hidden Russia and other anticommunist titles. Just as often, however, the Bureau was granted uncommon rights of pre-refusal. Holt editor Milt Hill, for example, asked FBI contacts for “advice as to whether we should do or not” a McCarthy autobiography, receiving a green light since it “would be a friendly book from a Bureau standpoint.”
Books less kind to the Bureau were rejected with its help at Holt and other firms. The manuscript of Fred Cook’s muckraking The FBI Nobody Knows, eventually published in 1964, was refused at Random House (home of The FBI Story) after publisher Bennett Cerf shredded professional ethics by forwarding a copy to Hoover.
Editorial informants such as Cerf, recruited in the wake of the Lowenthal embarrassment, made it practically impossible to criticize the FBI through a major New York publisher without costly delay. With the FBI fed the minutes of editorial board meetings at Time and Life, Fortune and Look, the Reader’s Digest and the Daily Worker, points along the full spectrum of U.S. print culture were opened to Bureau pre-awareness. To adapt Louis Nichols, there was now most always a body poised to throw itself between the presses.

https://theamericanreader.com/total-literary-awareness-how-t...

Of course that all stopped after the 70s/80s, right?

egypturnash3• 2 years ago

"Climatized"? Is this a fancy way to say "it has air conditioning" or does it mean "this building is so big it has its own microclimate without any attempt on our part to make this happen"?

nuthje• 2 years ago

I gather it's a way of saying it's climate controlled, i.e. heated or cooled depending on the season. I suppose as a contrast to calling any semi-random outside space the largest reading space.

foobarbecue• 2 years ago

Not in the original title, so either it was removed over there or extraneously added over here.

Merriam-Webster says that "climatized" means "acclimated" so I don't think it makes sense as used here.

egypturnash3• 2 years ago

Not entirely extraneous; the second paragraph of the page begins with "The library boasts the world’s largest climatized reading space and China’s largest load-bearing glass system[...]"

Paul-Craft2• 2 years ago

I assume you were joking about a building being so large it has its own microclimate, but I have been inside a building that has its own rain clouds. The building housed a styrofoam factory.

It was always hot and humid in there, probably due to the manufacturing process itself, but not uniformly so. Certain spots would be extra humid, which would cause water vapor to rise up to the ceiling. There were enough particulates in the air for it to then condense into droplets that looked like clouds, which would then create a very light drizzle 20-50 feet away.

I fucking hated that place.

sandspar9• 2 years ago

The styrofoam wasn't negatively affected by the moisture?

egypturnash3• 2 years ago

I am not joking about this, I was specifically thinking of the building NASA puts rockets together in before launching them. It's infamous for this sort of thing.

hereme8883• 2 years ago

I started browsing some of snohetta.com's designs... my brain could barely comprehend how astounding and magnificent some of their designs are. Truly amazing stuff.

dappermanneke• 2 years ago

a space to cultivate community, as long as said community is entirely nonthreatening to the CCP

perihelions• 2 years ago

What are the greatest libraries / reading spaces of the western world today?

outime• 2 years ago

Oodi in Helsinki is a quite interesting concept, although not the best if you want to be in complete silence.

Paul-Craft2• 2 years ago

Funny, I would have thought if anyone valued a quiet space to read without being bothered, it'd be the Finns. Looking at the pics on Wikipedia[0] though, it does look like there are some quieter spaces one can duck into. From what's pictured in the wiki article, it does look more like a tech company office crossed with a community center than a public library to me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Central_Library_Oodi

sandspar9• 2 years ago

The British Library, maybe, famous as being the haunt of Karl Marx, as well as of Lenin, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

trompetenaccoun• 2 years ago

There has been a real boom in building such modern libraries and bookstores all over China in recent years, cities have been competing with each other in building the coolest looking one. They're very popular with the Chinese version of Instagramers. Though I don't seen many people actually using them as libraries in most cases, especially long term once the novelty wears off. Trends come and go fast in China.

Very close to BJ, the BinHai Library for example was pretty much empty when I was there last time, apart from people going in to take photos of the admittedly beautiful design. But when most of the upper shelves have fake books in them (I kid you not), it says a lot about how far China's dedication to reading goes. The average Chinese isn't interested in intellectual stuff currently, it's all about making money and reading is basically only for students to get good grades and strike well-paid jobs.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of cool modern architecture that imo doesn't get enough recognition. It's sadly rarely practical though, it's more built for prestige than anything else. The top down planning has a lot of advantages and there's certainly a lot of bold designs that architects couldn't get approved in any democratic place these days, where there are endless committees ultimately settling for the most plain and boring construction, the lowest common denominator. But these party officials also aren't really thinking about what the people need, what would make cities more livable. It reminds me a bit of Albert Speer's Germania vision. Certainly impressive and cool to look at, but maybe not a place you'd want to live long term.

graemep• 2 years ago

It struck me that the article was talking about the building a lot, but very little about the books. Thanks for explaining.

ThrowawayTestr• 2 years ago

Well yeah it's an architecture website.

Cthulhu_2• 2 years ago

It's not uncommon in not-china either, public libraries are prestige buildings but it often feels like the purpose of them - books - is lost in favor of the prestige aspect.

I mean I'm only seeing a few images actually showing books, and those are only three shelves tall. I'm also seeing high ceilings, literal hills made out of steps but without any apparent function other than maybe crowd photo ops, and some reading tables.

But the amount of books is about the same as a small local library or bookstore. What happened to the multi-storey repositories? Endless rows of categorised books? I don't get it.

cratermoon4• 2 years ago

only three shelves tall

The trend in modern libraries is for shorter shelves to improve accessibility. Not everyone is 2m tall or can climb steps and ladders.

And it must be acknowledged that physical books are less important than access to knowledge, facilities for study, and librarians to assist. All of those can exist in a comfortable, quiet space with a fast internet connection, a few printers, and lots of invisible but still valuable electronic databases freely available: ProQuest, JSTOR, PubMed, ERIC, etc.

Yes, it's comfy and familiar to those of use who grew up before the internet to wander among the dim stacks of dusty books and take in the aromas, but the real value of a library is the information in whatever form it takes.

rufus_foreman• 2 years ago

> Certainly impressive and cool to look at, but maybe not a place you'd want to live long term

"Say this about absolute monarchies: While living under them is awful (tens if not hundreds of thousands died building St. Petersburg, their bodies laid into the foundation), they do leave behind magnificent cities. Democracies, while far more pleasant, leave behind places like Phoenix."

-- https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/02/how-st-petersburg-c...

cafard• 2 years ago

Intermittently and imperfectly democratic (or at least republican) cities such as Venice, Florence, Milan, and Rome managed to build impressive works. The English monarchs would have loved to be absolute, but didn't ever quite manage it, yet London isn't too shabby.

Slate sounds a bit like Harry Lyme in The Third Man contrasting Switzerland and Florence, anyway.

friend_and_foe• 2 years ago

Potemkin books hahaha now I've heard everything.

TOMDM• 2 years ago

Beautiful building.

A large open space with lots of hard materials though, I hope sound isn't an issue. The ceiling looks like it might be sound dampening though?

flanked-evergl• 2 years ago

I don't think you need sound dampening in China to keep people quiet.

sandspar9• 2 years ago

Many Chinese people are talkative and many of them talk very loudly.

lupusreal3• 2 years ago

People talking isn't the only reason a large space with hard surfaces might be loud. Even air circulation can become loud when bouncing around spaces like that.

fsiefken• 2 years ago

I like the stairs, until I wondered how handicapped or elderly people would get tp their sought after books. While I was a regular when I was young, visiting once or twice each week to bring and get as much books as I could carry. I now read less often, and what I read are mostly e-books. I do sometimes sit in VR reading an epub for the ambiance.

nsypteras• 2 years ago

Not sure how comfortable the "climatization" is given that many people in the pictures are wearing winter coats inside. Hopefully it's not sweltering in the summer...

itishappy2• 2 years ago

There's snow outside...

wnc3141• 2 years ago

Snohetta definitely my favorite architecture firms. They strike that balance between having creative ideas and nuanced and functional execution

dublinben• 2 years ago

This is an artificial hill covered in artificial trees illuminated by artificial lights, sealed in glass so they can maintain an artificially habitable atmosphere.

In other countries, you can just read outside on a real hill, under real trees, in the light of the real sun, breathing in non-polluted air.

angiosperm2• 2 years ago

Not so many books there, though, unless they are hidden away underground.

I will take the New York Public Library, which has a good reading room with lots of tables, and a very good collection.

eej71• 2 years ago

I like the space, but I think that's because it loosely resembles a Frank Lloyd Wright space.

https://franklloydwright.org/frank-lloyd-wrights-larkin-and-...

JoshGG• 2 years ago

That was my first reaction as well. Very much inspired by the wright work. It does look cool! I wonder about noise levels with all the hard surfaces and open space.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

This is certainly a cool looking space. I could see myself walking through it with cathedral-like awe. I don't know if I would want to browse the stacks here, being as they are in short cases separated by many stairs. I don't know if I would actually want to read here for any length of time, it seems sterile and echoey, with no privacy. I don't believe there has been any modern architectural innovation which surpasses a cozy nook with a wing-backed chair when it comes to pure reading enjoyment. Keep trying though.

I sometimes wonder, as I did with Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Central Library design, whether architects spend a lot of time actually using or working in libraries. I guess the brief isn't "make the best library for patrons" but "make a library which can symbolize the glory of our city and its wealth".

The largest climatized reading space

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