Musashino Art University Museum & Library

The project is a new library for a leading art university, part of a plan that also turns the existing library into a gallery so the two can work as one. The new building, the first phase, holds some 200,000 volumes on two levels, half on open shelves and half in closed stacks.

Thinking about what makes up the ultimate library, the design team arrived at books, bookshelves, light and place. They imagined a space enclosed by a single bookshelf wound into a spiral; the domain inside the endless spiral is the library itself.

Shelving walls 9 m high, cut by large openings, are layered into an endless forest of books. The spiral continues out to wrap the edge of the site as the outer wall, so the exterior shares the same make-up as the bookshelf library within. Met on the campus, the immense bookshelf reads at once as a library, yet startles with its dreamlike simplicity.

Libraries hold a contradiction between searching and exploring. Searching relies on a systematic order for finding a given book, an experience still shaped by the physical arrangement of volumes. Exploring is about discovery: a space that keeps renewing itself, unexpected connections, inspiration from unfamiliar fields.

The spiral lets the two coexist through its double movement. Its rotating, centred order supports searching, while the many layers seen through the radial openings open an endless depth of books for exploring. One can sense the whole library and still imagine spaces that remain just out of sight.