The expanded public library in Stockholm can be imagined as an addition to the Observatory Hill. Any conventional architectural extension, reproduction, or attachment to the original Asplund building would, we believe, trivialize the perfection and simplicity of its geometry, symmetry, and presence as an urban landmark. Instead, we have been inspired by the natural landscape that Asplund, with Glemme, designed as the building’s setting: the reflecting pond, hillside stream, plantings and earthworks that provided the frame and setting for the iconic building. The addition refines this frame and setting, rather than a new distracting building. It draws on precedents in Asplund’s own work, in which landforms and landscapes are composed in careful choreography and sympathy with more visible architecture. It is inspired also by the unique landscape and geography of Stockholm at a larger scale, by the monumental presence of Stockholmsasen, visible at Observatorielunden and stretching South as part of a glaciofluvial archipeligo of eskers and inlets, hills and islands that together define the geology and ecology of the city. The addition celebrates this essential element of this urban geology and ecology.

Exploded Axonometric and Site Axonometric

The concept for the library expansion is a reverse-excavation in which the hillside of the Observatory Hill is extended and expanded toward the Odengatan Street edge. The roof of the expansion becomes a new hillside park and garden, with the possibility of a new connection between the natural landscape of the Observatorielunden and the increasingly active and renewed Odengatan and Odenplan area.

The pathways and features of this park are a public representation and guide to the pathways and features of the new library inside and below. For example, a children’s carousel/merry-go-round in the park surrounds a skylit greenhouse that extends down into the library, becoming a circular reading room that brings daylight deep into the heart of the new building.

Program / Diagram

Within this hillside, the library expansion is envisioned as a single vast room, an interior landscape that reflects and connects to the natural landscape above. The concept for this room has been inspired by the central circular hall of the Asplund library, in which several floor-levels of bookshelves line the lower interior wall of a monumental space—the expansion imagines that these bookshelves have unfurled and extended, and then re-folded back into an interior terraced landscape. This interior landscape recalls the terracing of Asplund’s early plans for Observatory Hill, as well as the regular rectangular geometry of the Annex plans as originally drawn, (but not as later built). The Odengaten street wall is also inspired by Aslplund’s speculative project for an Odenhallen market, in which a window wall forms a new base; we have added a hillside above that suprisingly transparent base. Adjacent to the street, an interior sun room follows the slope of Odengatan, containing café, news zone, dedicated auditorium lobby, and other informal functions, through which pedestrians can filter and wander into the dedicated library floor below. Glass panels embedded in this surface become a digital information wall, sign, and site for art.
Administrative offices are positioned within a new thick ground above the main hall, with views above across the city, and views below across the library interior; The existing building is treated very lightly and with respect.

The concept of a single dynamic room below a new hill landscape allows flexible development and adjustment as the Library’s mission and constituents continue to develop; it allows a robust large-scaled interior area while producing a minimal impact on historic and iconic views andbuildings, and dramatic new ways to see the library and city. It aspires to a balance between natural and artificial, outside and inside, old and new, geology and ecology, landscape and architecture.

competition entry, 2006 : With Thomas de Monchaux