How can you possibly read a book or concentrate on writing when they are ripping the sides of the house out? Time to mount the magic carpet and find the perfect library. It turns out to be in China and it is something else.

MVRDV completes library shaped like a giant eye in Chinese city Tianjin

The Dutch firm MVRDV (Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs und Nathalie de Vries) built this futuristic concoction in a suburb of the important harbor town Tianjin. It has room for 1.2 million books, with the shelves clinging to the indented walls. The end of the shelves extend through the walls to the outside, providing some sort of privacy grid. The library can be entered in front and in back, as a connecting link between a future park and suburban apartment houses. That huge ball you see in the center of the library is reflective, making the hall look larger. It also contains an auditorium. Additional conference rooms and audio labs are located under the roof.

Come to think of it, I probably couldn’t read there any more than I can now here at home. I would be too distracted by the wish to photograph every single architectural detail.

Photographs of the building are from the web, the rest were taken this grey, cold March in Seattle’s Chinatown.

If you compare the new Chinese library to the one in Seattle, or, for that matter, the State Library of Hamburg, it is clear where the future lies.

The plan was to have the exterior of the house painted. The reality is our house now looks like swiss cheese after they opened up all the places where rot had set in from the rain and dampness of the last 20 years. Drilling, banging, ripping and patching. All I can do to save what’s left of my sanity is renting a magic carpet and flying to houses around the world that I have on my “to see” list. There is some breathtaking innovation out there, both in terms of how things are built but also what is, these days, considered award winning design.

I don’t know anything about architecture, be warned; what follows are just the musings of someone who looks at the wood/stone/steel/concrete and glass world and likes what she sees. Or not.

I believe the desire to impress with structures, to use them for psychological purposes as much as for practical ones, housing, worshipping, work or exhibition, is as old as humans’ desire to build. Think about how churches grew from humble meeting places to awe-inspiring cathedrals; how fences around your compound grew into fortified, walled castles. How the chief’s hut became the king’s palace. How the collections of patrons became exhibits in museums that proudly announce to the world what special cultural weight they carry.

I don’t mean to sound critical here – I think architecture has always been incredibly imaginative in pursuing its demanded purpose, and clever in finding ways of expressing individual ideas, making environments more habitable, more suited to any particularly groups’ needs; the innovation you see these days where money and technology are in large supply is stunning.

I’ll start with Den Blå Planet, the blue planet, a relatively new aquarium in Denmark outside of Copenhagen. It is on my bucket list to see one of these days. Indeed many of the buildings I’ll show this week are things that interest me but which I had not yet the occasion to visit. Photographs of these structures are from the web. Photographs of today’s jellyfish are my own, taken in Newport and Vancouver BC.

The building was designed by 3xN, a Danish architecture firm that also built the Danish embassy in Berlin (ugly) and the new museum in Liverpool (not overwhelmed.) But this spiral design here hits the spot. Wiki tells me that “the aquarium’s architecture was inspired by a whirlpool. From the entrance, guests step into the vortex of the whirlpool – the curved lobby – and from here are drawn out to the 53 aquariums and installations.”

For more details go to this link. https://www.archdaily.com/348532/the-blue-planet-3xn/

My fascination with this building comes from the combination of modern form somehow nestled just right in the surrounding environment while simultaneously representing some aspect of what it contains. For the aquarium that is of course the marine life – it did indeed remind me of jelly fish although one of their biggest attractions is apparently a shark tank. Some of the exterior resembles fish scales, and the curviness reminds of waves. In any case, I seem to react to echoes of sculpture in buildings, if I can put it that way. Not always, but often.

The spiraling complex is a large operation, not exactly a beacon of sustainability. But the link above explains: “Nevertheless the engineers have devised solutions to substantially cut energy consumption, for instance by using seawater in the cooling process, which is estimated to reduce energy consumption for cooling by 80%. The saltwater tanks also get their water from the sea while the freshwater tanks are supplemented by rainwater capture. In addition, the building is insulated to a high international standard and fitted with low-energy glazing.”

Worth a visit, don’t you think? Particularly when you flee construction noise.