A Norwegian Firm Builds a Library With No Straight Shelves

Curved timber shelving follows the reading rooms around a central void, and there is not a right angle in the building where a book meets a wall.

The site had been empty for nine years, long enough for the neighbourhood to form a settled opinion about what should happen to it, and long enough for two previous schemes to be abandoned at planning.

Chiara Romano, who spent a morning in the upper reading room, has been close to it from the start.

The decision

The shelves are laminated in eleven-metre lengths and bent on site, which means the joints fall where the curve is gentlest rather than where the structure would prefer.

Two of the people who started the project had left by the time it finished, and the handover notes are now part of the studio's standard kit.

Circulation is up eighteen per cent, and the librarians credit the wandering.

You cannot browse a curve the way you browse a wall. You wander instead.

the head librarian

In practice

Books are shelved by height rather than subject on the curved runs, a decision the librarians fought and then adopted.

The detail that will matter in ten years is the one nobody photographed: the junction where the new work meets the old, and who is expected to maintain it.

Peers have been generous in public and more pointed in private, mostly about cost.

Asked what they would change, the team answers with process rather than product: earlier conversations, fewer assumptions carried over from the last job, and a willingness to lose an argument in the first week rather than the last.

What comes next

It opened in March and has not been quiet since.