Europe's Most Innovative Library Has a Botanical Garden on the Roof

Standing connected the plot rooftop of the Warsaw University Library (Biblioteka Uniwersytecka w Warszawie) feels similar being astatine the halfway of the universe, oregon astatine slightest of Poland. From the perch, you tin spot the spire of the Palace of Culture and Science, the next-door Copernicus Science Centre, the basketlike PGE Narodowy stadium, and the banks of the Vistula River. Below, disposable done ample arching windows, it’s besides casual to spot students sitting successful the survey rooms below, surrounded by stacks of books.

There’s an inherent entreaty to room tourism—seeing the places wherever nations clasp their corporate cognition and history. Warsaw University Library makes for a peculiarly affluent stop. While this intelligence hub has lone been lasting astatine Dobra (“Good”) Street for 26 years, the room has been a long-standing awesome of the city’s combat for knowledge. Since its founding successful 1816, it’s survived some World Wars, the November Uprising successful 1830, and communism. At a clip when, erstwhile again, books and cognition are threatened, some successful the US and abroad, it’s besides a reminder of the wealthiness of cognition that tin beryllium mislaid successful the integer era.

The gathering strays dramatically from the Soviet-style artifact architecture that has defined truthful overmuch of the city’s character. As librarian Lilianna Nalewajska explains, its exterior, featuring a candy-colored pinkish grate from the erstwhile room digs (a symbolic nexus betwixt the past and the present), and a greenish façade with book-like engravings from Plato, Polish writer Jan Kochanowski, and different assorted classics, are tributes to what’s contained within. It’s peculiarly meaningful erstwhile you see the operation day of the gathering successful 1999, a specified 8 years aft the autumn of communism, erstwhile galore of those works were restricted from nationalist access.

“The thought of the architects of this place, Marek Budzyński and Zbigniew Badowski, was that it should amusement that this is an important spot for humanity,” Nalewajska says. “But present you volition find substance taken from antithetic cultures, antithetic attitudes. Visitors travel done the books into the light.”

The gathering is fabricated from solid and steel, a minimalist construction, designed to marque the astir of airy connected abbreviated wintertime days. Large greenish beams arch crossed the solid ceiling, creating a metallic, forest-reminiscent canopy. In 2002, Poland's Minister of Infrastructure bestowed the room with an grant for its "outstanding integer qualities."

As Nalewajska notes, the symbolism of the entranceway extends passim the full building, peculiarly notable successful the statues of Demosthenes and Sophocles, which basal connected columns flanking the entryway.