On entering the new centrepiece of the
Gulf State’s Education City, visitors find
themselves at the heart of a series of
stepped terraces of shelving that literally
engulf them in literature.2018
QATAR NATIONAL LIBRARY
OMA’s recent addition to its library
repertoire is the Qatar National Library,
completed in 2018. Located in Education
City, a master plan initiated to facilitate
Qatar’s transition into a knowledge-based
economy, the library will eventually house
over a million books. Following previous
attempts to tackle the question of digitiza-
tion, OMA realized in Qatar that the book
as an object had survived the technological
revolution. The challenge, instead, was to
make reading accessible and, according to
Koolhaas, ‘as stimulating as possible’. For
this purpose, OMA conceived the library
as a giant room: a single-storey, 42,000-m^2
space in which natural light penetrates the
interior through a corrugated-glass façade
and diffuses equally, thanks in part to
white marble floors and a high aluminium
ceiling. Circulation and a sense of orienta-
tion are offered by a column-free bridge
(with reading rooms, exhibition spaces and
an auditorium) that stretches between the
perimeters of the library. These elevatedfunctions create a terraced topography
around the central triangular core, enabling
the position of the main entrance – below
the shelves themselves – through which
visitors arrive at the centre of the library,
where they are at once surrounded by
books. The collection makes use of a shelv-
ing system that is an integral part of the
structure. It is built of the same marble as
the floors and includes infrastructural com-
ponents such as lighting and ventilation. ●
oma.euDe
lfin
o
Sis
to(^) L
eg
na
ni
an
d
M
ar
co
(^) C
ap
pe
lle
tti
, (^) c
ou
rte
sy
(^) o
f (^) O
M
A
FRAME LAB 161