Now this institution, which has existed in its current form for only 20 years, has become the third largest book depository in the world (250 thousand square meters) - after the French National Library and the American Library of Congress.
The new building, located in the western part of Beijing, is considered the "second phase" of the main Chinese library (after the main building, which opened in 1987, built in the spirit of pseudo-traditional architecture). It is designed for 8,000 visitors daily; the reading rooms are ready to accommodate almost 3,000 people at a time. In addition to storages and halls, on an area of 80 thousand m2 there is an exhibition complex for ancient scrolls and manuscripts in the basement and a digital library with 200 terabytes of information, arranged in the steel floors of the building.
The authors of the project, Michael Zimmermann and Jurgen Engel, tried to convey the ideas of traditional Chinese architecture and culture in general in the language of modern architecture. In their construction of glass and steel, you can see hints of a powerful plinth, a roof with a large overhang, a colonnade in front of the facade - the most important elements of Chinese architecture. They were also inspired by a work directly related to the function of their construction - "The Complete Collection of Books in Four Sections" (Siku Quanshu), a comprehensive collection of texts in all areas of knowledge and spheres of culture, created at the end of the 17th century. on the instructions of the Qing Emperor Qianlong. This corpus of nearly 40,000 volumes existed in seven copies, and the best-preserved of them will be on display in the new building of the National Library of China.
This building, which connects a museum of ancient culture and an experimental center for the development of digital methods of processing and using information, should provide the library with living space for the next 30 years, according to the leaders of the institution.
The successes both in architecture and in librarianship in China are strikingly different from the situation that has developed now around the project of the National Library of the Czech Republic. The radical work of the Future Systems bureau caused great irritation in the political and cultural circles of the country immediately after the victory of its authors in the architectural competition, so its implementation remained in question. Now it became known about the dismissal of the director of the National Library Vlastimil Ježek - precisely for supporting the Future Systems project - which reduces the chances of its implementation to a minimum.
