RCR arquitectes Mediateca Walsekrook

Source: RCR arquitectes & Fundació Mies van der Rohe Barcelona
Photography: Hisao Suzuki

The media library for Ghent University has a large-scale brief: a library, a centre for new media, an agora for children and youths, multi-purpose rooms, etc. A complex interior world focused on educational elements. The building is beside the Krook -the canal that runs throught the city, which reaches its lowest point here on its journey to the city centre-, a site that highlights Ghent’s two “ground” levels: the level of the canal and the level of the counties bridges that cross it.

The building can be regarded as having two base levels -city and meadow, street and square- liked by a double height agora that is multiplied on the upper floors to create a floe of vertical and also horizontal relations, patterned by a structure that fixes the building’s twist as it follows the flowing canal. Louvres, shelves, railings and overhangs are all echoes of the same sound: the sound that enhances the magic of soft light, where the complexity and the diversity of spaces and uses intermingle.
A large square for events, presided over by a powerful cantilever, and a citizen’s square, extend in the direction of new pedestrian bridges that cross the canal twice more. A bicycle parking area, a book distribution robot, an experimental Cubus, are all cogs in a complex machine that moves to the sound of modern times.