Central Library - Rotterdam
A design team consisting of Powerhouse Company, Atelier Oslo, Lundhagem, DELVA Landscape Architecture | Urbanism, Buro Happold and ISIS Bouwadvies has been selected by the City of Rotterdam and Stichting Bibliotheek Rotterdam to revitalise the Rotterdam Central Library. The city icon from the early 1980s was designed by Van den Broek & Bakema. The team was chosen from five leading (inter)national consortia to upgrade the library. Construction is expected to begin in late 2025 and be completed in late 2028; the year of the building’s 45th anniversary.
The new design is a model of radical reuse where a 1980s building transforms into a future-proof, contemporary library as the result of the expertise combination led by Powerhouse Company, Atelier Oslo and Lundhagem. The two Norwegian firms were responsible for the design of the Deichman Library in Oslo (voted the world’s best public library of the year 2021).
The city room
The design illustrates the growing importance of reuse in urban architecture. With a view to sustainability and preserving urban memory, the library from the last century has been successfully reinvented. For the team, this was a great opportunity to restore the original, eccentric design, which was lesser due to budget constraints. The renewal retains the original ideas behind the library and creates an intimate ‘living room for the city’. At the same time, it preserves the icon in a city known for its experimental architecture, adding a contemporary layer of sustainability and circularity.
The interior of the library will be drastically revamped by opening it on all sides. The library’s current storage areas will be transformed into a transparent atrium, in which several inviting spaces will be created. This way, visitors can discover the library for themselves and immerse themselves in a world of books.
The story of a monument
The Rotterdam Central Library is one of the city’s most famous buildings, instantly recognisable by the large yellow tubes reminiscent of the Centre Pompidou. The library stands on a square plot, with a diagonal cut orienting the building towards the market square and also bringing light into the atrium. This atrium is covered by a glass ‘waterfall’ that shows the system of escalators that runs up the full height. Opened in 1983, the library was designed by Van den Broek & Bakema with Hans Boot as project architect. It is a controversial but important building. It also characterises Rotterdam’s transition from a port- and work-oriented city to a cultural knowledge city, and from a post-war large-scale approach to urban planning to the more human scale. To quote a former Rotterdam alderman: ‘The Central Library has become an icon of Rotterdam. Whether you like it or not.’
The building shows that ‘public buildings in a city should stand out’, as Boot put it. According to Bakema, both the buildings and the city should have a dialogue between being together and being alone, between the large and the small scale. Unfortunately, some of the architects’ vision was heavily influenced by implementation cuts.
The future of the Central Library Rotterdam is public: accessible and open to all. The boundary between inside and outside of the building is blurred by communicating programming between the inside and outside.
– Steven Delva
Restoring the vision
Budget constraints particularly affected the building’s facade and transparency. The new design seeks to improve the use of glass to create a light, fluid and spacious experience, with unobstructed views to the outside. The lower intersecting escalators were positioned differently in the implementation, which compromised the rhythm of the design. The new design corrects this and also improves connectivity by adding large wooden grandstand stairs between floors.
The yellow tubes, originally intended for air treatment, will be retained, albeit in a more sustainable way. In addition, the iconic tubes are used as multifunctional elements and extended to the ground. This makes them part of the streetscape, tangible and approachable, and even more part of the building’s identity. Additional floor space, as well as light and transparency, are added by a new, glazed volume with wooden construction at the back of the library – in blue, just like the former storage room it replaces. This means the library will retain its colour signature, with white, yellow and blue. The new extension thus combines contemporary circularity with the eccentric language of the original building.
Making an entrance
The library’s existing main entrance seems far removed from the heart of the library. To improve this, the new design adds entrances on all sides, centrally located in each facade. These entrances enhance the accessibility of the ground-floor space and integrate well with the surrounding city, transforming the library into a true ‘living room of the city’. The corner of the square will be transformed into an inviting public terrace.
Inside, the interior has an intimate, relaxed and homely atmosphere. The various interventions to transform and extend the building create a succession of spaces that can accommodate a lively and flexible programme. This new layout makes it easy to oversee the diversity of programme: from rooms for cooking workshops to a climbing wall on the children’s ward. This sequence of spaces completes itself on the seventh floor, with a green, quiet reading room on one side, and terrace with stunning views of the city on the other – the (literal) highlight of the journey through the building.
- Location
- Rotterdam
- Status
- Sketch design
- Client
- Municipality of Rotterdam
- Together with
- Rotterdam Library, Powerhouse Company, Atelier Oslo, Lundhagem, Buro Happold, ISIS Bouwadvies