The library is an independent complex located on the banks of the Vistula, away from the old university building in the center of Warsaw.
“The competition project arose in 1993, in the fourth year of the new Poland's existence,” writes Marek Budzinski. - These were years of hope, confusion, confusion between the new and the old. For me, these were years of searching for a relationship to reality, developing my own worldview, as well as a simple struggle for survival. The main thing is that I tried to move in the direction that we call sustainable development."
The prehistory of the complex is as follows: at the beginning of the 20th century, a new library building was built on the territory of Warsaw University, along Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street. A hundred years later, it became morally obsolete, and a new building was required, more spacious and meeting the requirements of fire safety. At first, it was planned to use the building of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party to house the library, which was nationalized after 1989. This, however, turned out to be impossible due to the lack of structural reliability. The building was rented out to the Warsaw Stock Exchange, and the profits were used for the construction of a new library building.
In 1993, an open international competition was announced for the design of a new building, in which Marek Budzinski and his co-author Zbigniew Badovski with the team won. Construction work on the site near the embankment began in 1995.
Historically, Warsaw developed with its back to the river, and the banks of the Vistula remained, until recently, rather chaotic and sparsely built-up outskirts. The project took into account the advantage of the proximity of the river, it included the requirement to create a botanical garden next to the library. The winners of the competition proposed to make the botanical garden a university one, combining it into one whole with the operated roof: the green massif “smoothly climbs” onto the roof of the building, forming a single multi-level recreational space. This technique, plus the low height and the classicized regularity of the other three facades, provided the monumental building with a soft and harmonious entry into the important area of the Vistula panorama.
The library has two underground and four aboveground floors. The competition project provided for the creation of an additional commercial zone on the territory of the library. Therefore, the first underground floor is almost entirely occupied by trade, service workshops, bookstores, etc. (floor -2, as usual, is given to the parking lot). The zero level of the library (1st floor) is occupied mainly by funds. The main public spaces are located on the second floor, while the third and fourth are occupied by reading rooms and service rooms.
The ground volume is divided into two parts. The first is the so-called "Roguelike" - an elongated triangle of irregular shape, where trade and a cafe are located on all floors. The second is the main building, close in plan to a square, occupying an entire block. About a quarter of this block is occupied by the Faculty of Law and Administration, forming a separate inner square with its own courtyard. In the diagonally opposite corner of the library area, a recess has been made, enveloping the historic building of the Gray Villa.
Between Rogalik and the main building is Ulichka - a pedestrian promenade with top glazing.
Having reached the middle of "Ulichka", one can get into the library itself, although its space does not begin immediately: it is preceded by a kind of transitional, buffer zone. On the axis perpendicular to the "Street" there is a symbolic gate of the "Shrine of Knowledge", above which a copper book, fixed on a glass wall, with a Latin inscription: Hinc omnia ("From here everything") "hovers".
To the right of them is the library's restaurant, to the left is the exhibition hall. The representative main facade - the Culture Facade - is located on the side of the Rogalik, two entrances to the complex are located at the ends of Ulichka.
On the main facade, as in the building of the Palace of Justice (another iconic building of Budzinski in Warsaw), a combination of a glass wall and a patinated copper colonnade is used. In this case, the columns are thin, connected in pairs by large copper tables. They reproduce ancient texts in Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Old Russian and Old Polish, as well as manuscripts of mathematical formulas and notes. The columns support a massive symbolic frieze with the inscription "University Library".
One Polish critic wrote that the Facade of Culture, like a fig leaf, shyly covers the commercial zone, the proceeds of which are directed to the maintenance of the library. In my opinion, there is no shyness or, even more so, no sarcasm in it: the facade is serious. It has a clearly readable idea of the connection of times through the high points of thought and inspiration - which we call culture. And the "Roguelike" of commerce even introduces into the library zone that necessary element of the "everyday", without which it would be too "strict" and unambiguous. The theme of the creative role of contradictions, which is cross-cutting for Marek Budzinski, finds its organic reflection here.
"Ulichka" with its shops and cafes "sucks" the external chaos into the clear structure of the library space, where Culture dominates. Even sitting in a cafe or walking through shopping galleries, people see the entrance to the treasury of knowledge and a reminder: "From here everything." This inscription opens the perspective of the library space perpendicular to "Street". Symbolic propylaea are "drawn into" it: two paired thin columns deployed at 45 degrees and two monumental flattened pylons with images of texts. Further, the reader crosses the "magic" glass line, indicated by the floating book, and enters the sacred space of knowledge. The direction continues with a wide flight of stairs, picked up by the take-off of four entrance columns. From here, a vast area of the high hall of catalogs and information opens up to the eye.
The Colonnade of Philosophers are simple elongated cylinders of rough concrete, without bases, entasis and capitals, which have become pedestals for four realistic sculptures of Polish thinkers. Attention is drawn to the complete absence of pathos, soft, kind intonation and a spark of humor in the interpretation of their images.
In the depths of the opening perspective of the hall, another staircase leads to a rotunda surrounded by columns under a glass dome. This is the intersection of three perpendicular coordinate axes: vertical and two horizontal. The main treasury of the library is located under the rotunda - closed collections, separated from the upper levels by glass. Thus, the entire vertical axis resembles a symbolic well from which knowledge can be drawn. The glass dome lets in mysterious rays of pinkish light like threads connecting the "well of knowledge" with the universe.
The long nave of the catalog hall, the glass dome over the middle cross of the axes, the rhythmic step of the paired columns separating the three levels of the "choir" - the sacred symbolism literally permeates the main space of the library. The columns are given the image of trees: with their metal "branches" they stretch towards the sky, supporting the transparent glass roof over the main space of the library. Around the central nave are grouped reading rooms, rooms for processing collections and other necessary departments of the library. One of the main advantages of the project, the members of the jury called the "elasticity" of spaces, the possibility of their transformation to meet the changing needs of the library. Ground tiers, in addition to two wide flights of stairs on the main axis, are united by four vertical lines of graceful spiral staircases on either side of the main nave. All five levels of the library are connected by seven communication trunks with elevators and fire escapes.
A glass bridge is thrown across the space of the main hall, from which one can see in the accessible vicinity the stone eccentric philosophers crowning the entrance columns. The upper tier turns out to be in the "forest" of metal branches (or prehistoric stamens) as "capitals" of huge paired columns. A gigantic, through and through transparent metal-glass space opens from here with unexpected, sharp angles.
Unlike the austere and calm interiors of the Palace of Justice, the spirit of the game is invisibly present here, expressed in an unpredictable change in amazing spatial plots. This game, which has nothing to do with postmodern parody irony, is also present in the external appearance of the building. The change of facades is completely unpredictable, each of which is endowed with its own unique look. At the entrance to Ulichka, which is adjacent to Lipovaya Street, a manganese-pink shelving structure has been installed, which has lost its function, but has become an important decorative element.
The facade on Lipovaya Street consists of three independent parts: a glass facade of the Faculty of Law and Administration with copper lictor symbols and walls entwined with greenery framing it on both sides (they refer, respectively, to the public space "Ulitsa" and to the library). This concrete surface ("ecological" facade) is the main fabric of the building envelope, repeating in different combinations on each of its sides.
The corner of Lipova Street and Kostyushkovskaya Embankment is secured by a semicircular ledge and a viewing rotunda crowning it ("Belvederic") overlooking the Vistula. Here, at the corner, there is a small classical arch with a bust - fragments of the former building here that serve as a “memory of the place”.
The facade along the Kostyushkovskaya embankment makes an indent for the reconstructed building of the Gray Villa of the early XX century. The concave corner is clad in mirrored glass, reflecting the red brick neo-Gothic outlines. Both the glass and the main "ecological" surface are adjoined by a row of tall cylinders that house ventilation devices. They look like mighty free-standing columns and enhance the monumental sound of the building.
Finally, the fourth facade is designed as an "ecological" wall with a green ramp along which the university garden smoothly "crawls" onto the roof.
The library complex has a whole network of well-thought-out urban planning links: Dobraa Street brings the rhythm of city life here, Lipowa Street stretches an axis to the old university, the historical Saska Axis is shot at the intersection of Dobrza and Genstey Streets - another thread connecting with Warsaw's past. At the same time, the favorable location of the building on the Warsaw slope (Vistula bank) lays the foundation for the further development of this area. Thus, here again the leitmotifs of Budzinsky's work sound in full force: the unity of contradictions, the connection between the past and the future, the dialogue of nature and culture.
*** Roof garden
The hanging garden on the roof of the library, covering an area of more than one hectare, is one of the largest and most beautiful in Europe (designer Irena Baerska). It consists of two parts - upper and lower, united by a gentle slope with streams of water flowing down a cascade. The "cosmogonic" granite sculptures-boulders by Rykhard Stryjecki became a special decoration of the lower garden.
The upper garden is divided into several sections, and each has its own plot of forms, color, aroma and mood. These are gold, silver, carmine and green gardens (the latter is located above the "Rogalik" of commerce, from the side of Dobra Street). A gently sloping green ramp leads to the roof, turning into the contours of the gazebo above the glass dome of the library.
This gazebo is a steel hemispherical frame, entwined with greenery, and continues the theme of communication with space. Therefore, it is called the "gazebo-antenna". Glass skylights cover 20% of the roof area. In two places, there are sightseeing walking bridges above them. Beautiful panoramas open up from here.
Despite the modern landscape design, the roof of the university library is striking in its palace elegance. At the same time, ventilation devices play the role of marble vases, and glass domes above the reading rooms play the role of pavilions. Cascades of water, "cosmogonic" sculpture, skillful spatial subjects - all this turns the green roof of the library into real gardens of Babylon or the parterres of Versailles moved upstairs.
Marek Budzinski likes to emphasize that with high technical equipment and the presence of an upper garden, the cost of the library turned out to be relatively moderate - primarily due to the use of concrete as the main building material.
The architecture of the library and Budzinsky's handwriting as a whole are difficult to classify in style. Sometimes he is labeled a postmodernist, but this is not true. In public buildings in Budzinsky, there are always symbolic elements that focus attention in one or another locum sacrum (there may be several such sacred places). In the university library, which is interpreted as the "Shrine of Knowledge", it is a crossroad of axes with a "Treasury" of closed funds and a gazebo-antenna on the roof. These "historicisms" of Budzinsky are aimed at finding in architecture the original "Platonic" essence, a supra-functional meaning, while postmodernism is essentially a parody of tradition, removing a thousand-year halo from it. In other words, if postmodernism reduces the sacred to the ordinary, then Budzinsky, on the contrary, raises the ordinary to the status of the sacred.
The postmodern play of the absurd is actually very rational and intellectual. On the contrary, Budzinsky's irrationality is spontaneous and intuitive. Their message is exactly the opposite: in the first case, the loss of meaning is ascertained, in the second, the acquisition of meaning is experienced.
