Stockholm library

The Site

The Stockholm City Library, designed by Gunnar Asplund and completed in 1928 occupies the Northeast corner of a large site at the intersection of two principal streets: Odengatan and Sveavagen in the area known as the Stockholm College District (fig. 1).


1 Stockhom City Library Expansion, site plan

The site is dominated by Observatory Hill, the remaining fragment of an esker, a gravel ridge that once traversed Stockholm and which was deposited by an ancient river that flowed beneath the Pleistocene ice sheet 10,000 years ago. The hill is named for the Stockholm Observatory, designed by C. Harleman in around 1750 and is landscaped with an English garden, Observatory Grove, laid out upon the hill during the 1790s. By the Eastern side of the hill, along Sveavagen lies that part of the park which was designed by Asplund in connection with the erection of the Public Library, featuring most prominently a large rectangular reflecting pool.

Due to increased public use and structural changes in modern library services and media, a design was required that would more than quadruple the space available to the general public. The area available for this expansion lies along Odengatan to the South of the original building, between the street and esker, (fig. 2) opening towards the triangular plaza of the Odenplan which forms a foreground to the Gustav Vasa Church, located on the diagonal Karlsberg Avenue.


2 View of model from Odengatan with existing building at left and new library at right



The Asplund Library

The Asplund Library is an iconic modernist architectural expression of the Enlightenment faith in Reason (fig. 3). The perfect geometry of the high rotunda lifts the intense Nordic light over the encircling tiers of accumulated knowledge, placing Man at the center of his city and his world. This idea of Reason is based on belief in the rationality of the individual, and the generalization of this idea to describe the human condition.


3 Asplund Library from Sveavagen Reflecting Pool

As modern civilization has become exponentially more complex, the result has not been correspondingly increased rationality, however, but rather, the danger of irrationality in intricate systems gone awry. While rationality itself endures, Reason is eclipsed.

The neo-Platonic geometry of Asplund's library aligns the ideas of knowledge and Reason, creating in the rotunda a supreme architectural embodiment of the allegory of the cave, described by Socrates in Plato's Republic, where human knowledge is shown to be the shadow of eternal verities, cast by the light of Truth into the cave from above (fig. 4).


4 Asplund Library, rotunda interior

Since Asplund's time, the idea of absolute knowledge derived from Reason has been challenged by the concept of an infinitely diffused flux of information. In this view, all facts are susceptible of multiple interpretation, all knowledge understandable from multiple perspectives, each capable of yielding its own truths within the context of its perspective. Nevertheless, we are still concerned that "truth as correctness of assertion is quite impossible without truth as the unhiddenness of things".

The primacy of books has at the same time given way to a multiplicity of media, the power of the word, either written or spoken, giving way to the fascination of the image. A library has become an ever-more egalitarian structure tending to unite information with entertainment, and to displace the union of knowledge and enlightenment.

It is one of the extraordinary aspects of the original library that it is subtly rotated at 5 degrees towards Odenplan. Why did Asplund rotate his building?

The axis of the Observatory passes through the center of the rotunda, and this is a geometrical recognition of the library's immediate cultural and historical context, of the relationship of science and knowledge. But the base of the building is not itself aligned with anything. Far from being arbitrary, however, the building is half rotated towards the principal urbanistic facts outside the College District - Odenplan, the Gustav Vasa Church and the Karlsberg Avenue, which terminates in Karlsberg Castle (fig. 5).


5 Site plan showing partial roation of Asplund Library towards Odenplan and entry to new building from Karlsberg Avenue



What Asplund has done is to create a suspended moment as the building moves towards acknowledgment of the power of church and state from the vantage point of rationalism and philosophy. The building is, as it were, starting from a reverie, caught at the moment between contemplation and participation, between the Classical and the Modern, and between the timeless and the temporal.

Proposed Expansion

Our proposal for the expansion of the Asplund Library extends the landscape of Observatory Hill towards Odengatan by continuing the plateau of its esker (fig. 6). The project thus extends the scale of human time, symbolized by the Asplund rotunda, to the scale of geologic time. By so doing, the building places the flux of human information within the context of the mutability of nature .


6 Diagram of addition and its relationship to Observatory Hill

The angled, interconnected and open-ended forms of the new building express the digital flow of global information characteristic of modernity. These indeterminate forms are contrasted with the neo-Platonic geometries of Asplund's building and their origins. In doing so, the design reaches back before Plato to the pre-Socratic philosophers. The design seeks to express the modernity of the digital flow of information in the context of Heraclitus' aphorism: "everything flows and nothing is left unchanged".

Where Asplund's rotunda evokes Plato's allegory of the cave, our project proposes a building in the form of a luminous grid whose indeterminacy is analogous to the ancient paradox of the river in which one cannot step twice in the same water.