The City of Rotterdam has selected Powerhouse Company, Atelier Oslo, Lundhagem to renew and extend the city’s Central Library, a landmark building from the early 1980s designed by Van den Broek & Bakema. The new design adopts the concept of radical reuse in order to transform a 1980s building into a contemporary library, well-adapted to the necessities of modern users. The team combines the expertise of Powerhouse Company, Atelier Oslo, and Lundhagem, the latter two offices being awarded in 2021 with the Public Library of the Year Award for their design of Oslo!s Deichman library. Construction is expected to begin in 2025 and be completed by the end of 2028, the year marking the building!s 45th anniversary.
In recent years, the understanding of a library has changed radically. This inspired us to transform the existing spaces for collections and storage into an open and welcoming environment for people to meet and work. The new Rotterdam library will become a living room for the entire city, offering a new kind of public space. - Nils Ole Brandtzæg, Atelier Oslo
This example of reuse demonstrates the importance of this practice in urban architecture and its central role both in creating a sustainable built environment and in preserving the memory of the city. The team understood this project as an opportunity to optimize the original, spectacularly eccentric, design, which was downgraded due to budget. The project seeks to bring forth the original ideas, to create a “living room for the city”. The interior of the library was redesigned and opened up on all sides. The architects also added a transparent extension at the back, replacing a former storage area with spaces that can welcome visitors.
Rotterdam Central Library is an instantly recognizable landmark, with its clusters of yellow tubes somewhat reminiscent of the Centre Pompidou. Built by Van den Broek & Bakema with Hans Boot as project architect, the library opened in 1983 to a mixed reception. As a symbol of Rotterdam’s transition from an industrial port to a knowledge center, from post-war monumentalism to human-scale urban planning, the library remains somewhat controversial to this day, though its importance in the Rotterdam cityscape cannot be denied.
The building expresses the views of its designers that #public buildings should stand out in a city,” as Boot put it. Unfortunately, the architects’ vision was not fully matched by the execution of their design, which was pressured by budget constraints. The former budget particularly impacted the façade with its white bands and strip windows. Transparency was sacrificed for cost-effective but heavy window frames. One of the leading principles of the redesign was to bring back this idea of transparency, to create a light, fluid spatial experience with unbroken views outside. Furthermore, the yellow tubes, originally meant for air conditioning, remain in use as part of the ventilation system.
New entrances have been added on every side to enhance the permeability of the ground-floor space and create a better connection with the city fabric, including the lively market square. The various interventions to transform and expand the building have resulted in a sequence of spaces capable of housing a flexible program that features everything from a cooking workshop to a kids’ climbing wall – as well as plenty of places for studying, learning, reading or simply browsing. The upward progression of the spaces culminates on the seventh floor, which houses a green and silent reading room on one side, and on the other, a more extravert terrace with wonderful views of the city.
Three architecture offices have united for this project: the Rotterdam-based Powerhouse Company and Norwegian architecture offices Atelier Oslo and Lundhagem – with landscape architecture firm DELVA Landscape Architecture & Urbanism, engineering consultants Buro Happold, and cost advisor ISIS Bouwadvies. Recently, Powerhouse Company has also revealed designs for a floating timber Office in Rotterdam, and a new Working and Living Complex in Amsterdam.
