Museum of Modern Literature

The museum stands on a rock plateau above a river valley, in a park already holding a literary museum from 1903 and a literature archive from the 1970s. It shows twentieth-century treasures from the archive, including famous original manuscripts, and offers wide views over the landscape. It won a major British architecture prize in 2007.

Embedded in the slope, the building shows different faces to its surroundings. On the brow of the hill a shaded, intimate entrance faces the older museum and its park, while toward the valley a grander sequence of terraces steps down. On the highest terrace the museum appears as a pavilion, its entrance enclosed by slender concrete columns.

From the pavilion, the route leads down to the inward-looking galleries, gradually moving from daylight to the artificial light needed to protect fragile paper. Fine concrete, tropical hardwood and limestone give the interiors their calm.