towards a hive of activity – was also employed by COBE
in its design of Tingbjerg Library and Culture House in
Copenhagen. Multifunctional rooms serve such diverse
facilities as classes, workshops, lectures and musical
performances; the activities occurring within enliven
the glass façade from without. The Tingbjerg project,
too, was designed with input from local residents, and
here – a marginalized area with high crime rates – the
need for a positive social nucleus is very real. Together
with the City of Copenhagen and social-housing
corporations FSB and SAB, COBE developed a building
that will service the neighbourhood at large, as well as
local housing-corporation residents and students from
Tingbjerg School. The architects created what they call
a ‘typecase’, which comprises ‘flexible, multifunctional
rooms that invite interaction, contact and community’,
says Dan Stubbergaard, architect and founder of COBE.
‘Our ambition is for the Tingbjerg Library and Culture
House to become a social and cultural engine.’
A utopian ideal, maybe, but if libraries are deemed
powerful enough to remedy social ills, then it’s no wonder
some municipalities are taking preventative measures. In
Australia, a 3,000-m^2 library forms the heart of Sydney’s
Green Square, a new urban development that will wel-
come 60,000 residents over the coming 15 years. Stewart
Hollenstein answered the call for a public library and a
plaza by uniting the two typologies. Despite the former
being largely buried beneath the latter, recesses and
mounds break up the plane like the peaks and troughs
on a graph, the horizontal equivalent of the perforated
façades at Calgary’s Central Library and the Tingbjerg
institution. ‘Libraries play a unique role in our cities as
highly democratic spaces,’ says Matthias Hollenstein,
director of Stewart Hollenstein, who refers to the project
as an ‘urban living room’. (There’s that term again.) By
keeping the design adaptable, his firm ensures that the
building can respond to the neighbourhood’s evolu-
tion and expanding population while fulfilling its manyfunctions. Included in the programme are a computer lab
for teaching (coding, robotics and 3D printing), a theatre
and music room for practice and performance, and the
Anything Room: a flexible space that the community can
hire for just about anything, as the name suggests.
Part of a collective design process, these case stud-
ies are integrated into their respective urban fabrics, hav-
ing been designed to enrich and educate the communities
they serve. It’s clear that libraries are no longer book
sanctuaries; perhaps that appellation is now reserved
for buildings belonging to the recent Chinese designer-
bookstore revolution. As society’s relationship to media
changed, the library needed to adapt – and it did. But it
must continue doing so to remain relevant. The next-gen-
eration library is heading in the direction of what many
modern offices hope to be: a fluid space that’s accessible
to the wider community, complete with a mix of quiet and
social spaces, hospitality zones and learning areas. (See
Frame 126 to read more on this topic in our full Office
report.) ‘One way to stay relevant is to make the library a
space for people, not for books,’ says a spokesperson for
the Design Thinking for Libraries toolkit, a resource that
helps library initiators to understand the needs of patrons
and to engage the surrounding community. (Ideo led
the creation of the toolkit, which was developed by the
Aarhus and Chicago public libraries and is the result of a
project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s
Global Libraries Program.) ‘We see libraries as ongoing
prototypes. The design should keep on transforming
according to the needs of the community.’
Which means that even if physical books do
disappear, might tomorrow’s library become an AR-
and VR-infused learning centre? The indoor equivalent
of a public park? A new alternative to the co-working
model? As long as the democratic design model con-
tinues, the answer is at least partly in the hands of the
library’s users. ●Libraries
are deemed
powerful
enough
to remedy
social ills
TINGBJERG LIBRARY AND
CULTURE HOUSE, COPENHAGEN
COBE’s design of Tingbjerg Library and Culture House in Copenhagen
features ‘flexible, multifunctional rooms that invite interaction, contact
and community’, says Dan Stubbergaard, architect and founder of the
firm. He hopes the project will become a ‘social and cultural engine’.
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140 LIBRARIES