New National and University Library

The National University Library in Ljubljana has been waiting for its extension for 40 years. It is almost unbelievable that the most important national institution in charge of preserving and developing the printed heritage cannot break the Gordian knot of being trapped in the status quo. We architects therefore sovereignly ask ourselves what are the decisive factors that prevent the competent ministry from taking a final decision and building the new library according to plans that are constantly being thought and decided upon in several different contexts and artistic expressions. We look with extreme jealousy at the construction of state-of-the-art libraries in Germany, Finland, Norway and elsewhere in Europe over the last ten years.

To be honest, the location is not ideal from a content point of view. Just a metre and a half underground is the junction of two of the most important ancient roads, a fact that in the 21st century has become a fact of life. century, it is very difficult to overlook. On the other hand, the library is not only a first-class public space, inviting into its embrace the educated, the students and the less studious citizens as a city living room, but also a sophisticated and spacious repository of all that is produced in print in the country. If, on the one hand, the openness and mission of the institution want and need to operate in the heart of a historic city, the preservation of books is a function that could also be carried out in less exposed and prestigious locations.

By participating in the competition, where we won the second prize, we tried to express the contradictions of the location, the programme and the symbolic value of the National Library in a specific, almost pictorial way. The first attribute, the archaeological layer, has been preserved as much as possible. The lowered ground floor presents the remains in their original form, as intact as possible. The large and heavy building therefore stands on six round legs, touching the ground only where the historical values are the smallest. A relatively introverted two-storey book store is designed as a bridge structure across six points of support. The closed high louvre creates an optical division between the open ground floor and the floating mass above it, while at the same time protecting the books from the outside elements with its opaque façade.

The top of the three-storey composition is made up of four reading, study and administrative floors, with views and light opening out to the four sides of the city. The central part of the building’s crown is a large reading room, which in its proportional and visual allegory is based on Plečnik’s reading room, while the view from the Ljubljana Castle connects the two institutions into a visual whole.

Unlike the winning solution of the competition, which takes the classical and established rectangular structure with the central outcrop of the reading room almost verbatim from its older sibling, firmly rooted in the historical matrix, the competition proposal articulated the disparities of history, content and geometry of the envisaged project in a completely different way. Since these disparities are so many, it is not surprising that a more coherent, coherent and historically consistent solution has not yet been built.

Authors of the project: BLENKUŠ Matej; FLORIJANČIČ Miloš; ZORC Mitja; MLINARIČ Tomaž