Biblioteca Vasconcelos
Biblioteca Vasconcelos is a study in contrasts. It’s at once a marvel of design and public infrastructure—the largest library in Mexico at 400,000 square feet, and one of the most stunning architecturally in the world. The lead architect Alberto Kalach designed it to resemble an Ark, “a carrier of human knowledge, immersed in a lush botanic garden.”
From the outside though, a little less stunning. While it does look like a large ship, it’s rather non-descript. One might confuse it with a stale government administrative building.
Until you step inside, that is.
The space opens all around you and stretches across the entire cavernous building. It’s breath-taking. The openness reaches uninterrupted to the top of the building’s seven stories where a sunroof runs across the spine of the building distributing light down to the marble floor and across to the outer edges of each of the floors. Hugging that open space are hanging metal cages of books that cascade down from the top almost as if they’re floating. Every angle feels accounted for, allowing a line of sight across most of the building from almost any point in the middle of the structure.
It's a welcoming invitation to public knowledge.
And yet it also feels kind of eerie, like you’re on the set of a dystopian, sci-fi movie. The inside is covered in concrete and steel – books in steel cages, suspended catwalks and stairways entirely constructed with steel beams, and ceilings on each floor with exposed concrete. It’s industrial in the way that 1984 Apple commercial was.
That industrial eeriness is deepened by the light or lack of it around the edges of the building. On each floor behind the floating bookshelves are rows of tables that run parallel to the walls of the building. The sides of the building don’t emit much light because they’re protected from the sun by large, diagonal shades that run up and down the entirety of the building’s sides. The effect is that inside away from the open middle it feels like you’re in a cave.
But just like so much in Mexican design, nature isn’t far away.
Every floor has a series of patios along the sides of the building where you can sit on benches that look out over the surrounding mote of gardens, Jacarandas, Palm trees, and walking paths.
A public library of this scale required not just artistic prowess, but also political ambition (and money). It was launched in 2002 and was to be a crowning achievement of the Vicente Fox Administration. They set out with grand ambitions too. The library, which was named after Jose Vasconcelos, a philosopher of the Mexican Revolution, was destined to hold 2 million books and receive 5,000 visitors daily. It’s barely scratched a third of those numbers.
The trouble started when Fox insisted that the library be completed before the end of his term, in 2006. Kalach and his team were awarded the contract in 2004, giving them about 18 months. To accelerate the process, Kalach’s team would lead design while the government would head up construction, which was then further divided between two different contractors.
The library did open in 2006, but less than a year later it had to close for repairs. The roof leaked. The repairs took two years before the library could reopen.
Probably to no one’s surprise given that timeline and those mistakes, the project ran well over budget. And so before it was even completed, the cost cutting began. The final pieces of Kalach’s vision were never finished. An outdoor cafe located in the surrounding ribbon of gardens stands vacant. The gardens, while still beautiful, never became the full-fledged botanical garden Kalach envisioned because the funds weren’t available to hire the expertise needed to maintain it.
And yet what they accomplished is still a magnificent feat.
As we left the building after spending a couple of hours getting lost inside and out on the trails, there was a Mexican band playing in the main foyer (there’s also a concert auditorium in the back which can be reached via a tunnel-like pathway). They played at the base of library, near the entrance, and the music washed its way through the open spaces.
