Library Centre of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics

The concept of the modern library puts the user before the book. A platitude that in architecture could be translated into the thesis that a well-designed ambience is more important than bare function, and atmosphere more important than the number of bookshelves. With the rise of digitisation of printed material, the ubiquitous availability of digital books, scholarly articles and periodicals, it is becoming clear that we no longer go to libraries to access information, but to confront it. More and more space in modern libraries is therefore devoted to education, communication and discourse. Bookshelves are declining, often becoming just a soundtrack to a dedicated space for knowledge and research.

In the existing building of the Slovenian Centre of Accounts, which was extended at the beginning of the century with the award-winning building of the Department of Mathematics by the architectural firm Bevk-Perović, the Faculty has dedicated a significant part of the ground floor to a new library, where all the departmental libraries of mathematics, physics, astronomy and meteorology would be united.

Based on the good experience with the Mafia Science Café project, the Faculty’s management has set an ambitious goal for the new library to become a hub for faculty debates, events and scientific gatherings. The buildings of the two key departments of the Faculty, Mathematics and Physics, do not have the so-called informal spaces for education, which plays a central role in modern education and research institutions. This is why much of the library’s available space is dedicated to content that, at first glance, does not belong there. The entrance lobby is designed as a relaxed “lounge”, a loud reading room with a direct link to the café. Movable armchairs with height-adjustable tables allow the lobby to be quickly and efficiently transformed into a conference room, classroom, teaching workshop or simply a faculty lounge. Sliding walls perforated with ‘knowledge bubbles’ can be used to separate the lobby from the library’s book section in the evening, turning it into a club space for evening debates.

The centrepiece of the library is a snake of interwoven bookshelves, where the knowledge of physics, mathematics, astronomy and meteorology interconnect, intersect and open up. The metaphor of the library as a labyrinth of the effort of knowledge and the casualness of ignorance, best presented in Eco’s book Name of flower, gradually leads us to the “auditorium” – a lectern for organised lectures, relaxing with a book, reading e-mails or just intellectual socialising overlooking the library visitors. At the end of this “chapter”, we enter a quiet reading room, dedicated to in-depth study, where students and teachers meet again around a large “common table”.

For architects, designing a library is undoubtedly a privileged task. The many books, with their texture, rhythm and characteristic smell, create a unique backdrop for the creation of a space of silence, imagination, expectation and capacity. To the many letters, words, sentences, drawings and equations that begin to accumulate in the kilometres of bookshelves when books are moved, we humbly add the atmosphere of a space filled with expectations, emotions and excitement.

Authors of the project BLENKUŠ Matej, CIMPERMAN Katja, CVETREŽNIK Anja