During the 2023 World Library and Information Congress organised by IFLA in Rotterdam, the 2023 Best Public Library Award was presented to the Gabriel García Márquez Library.
Gabriel García Márquez Library joins the prestigious list of libraries that have received this recognition. It is the first time that a library in southern Europe has been nominated for this international award. It is also the first time that a library around 4,000 m² has been nominated for the award, since previous libraries had a larger surface area.
Opened on May 28, 2022, Gabriel García Márquez Library, dedicated to the Nobel Prize laureate in literature who lived in Barcelona, is the central library of the Sant Martí district. It belongs to Barcelona Libraries, the city’s network of 40 public libraries.
Since the implementation of the first Barcelona Libraries Plan in 1998, the city's network of public libraries has been a top priority in the city cultural sphere. This commitment has resulted in a significant positive impact on the public, with libraries consistently ranking among the two most highly more valued facilities in the city. The recently launched Barcelona Libraries 2030 Master Plan is part of the broader Cultural Rights Plan, aiming to position cultural rights as fundamental rights and strengthen the democratic life of the city. This plan incorporates strategic fields such as education, sustainability, innovation, and technology, among others, to ensure that libraries are deeply embedded in the local community.
This new library is located in a popular neighbourhood of working-class tradition, with a very active civil society of great vitality which is organised in entities belonging to the local social, cultural and educational fabric. Within the building, the residents association has its own archive sheltering part of the neighbourhood’s historical memory. The library also features an auditorium, a cooking workshop, and a radio studio, Radio Maconda – a station managed by the Barcelona Libraries network which offers services to organisations and educational centres of the surroundings.
The library stands in a dense urban node at the confluence between two neighbourhoods, so the geometry of its structure is adapted to the layout of the surroundings, following the alignment of the chamfered street corner, a typical urban feature of the city. The building has a solid sculptural shape and stands on a raised plaza forming a showcase agora, which allows fluid pedestrian transit along the neighbourhood’s cultural axis. The library is cantilevered over the open area, creating a porticoed plaza that is bounded on the other side by magnificent trees.
It is a library that preserves the essence and delivers innovation in services. It promotes reading through the development of routines and reading skills, writing and orality; culture and cultural rights establishing ties with the education sector and providing support for continuing lifelong education and training; guarantees access to information and knowledge; becomes a forum for creating knowledge, verifying reliable information, and beating the digital and social divide. It delivers interaction between physical and virtual services. Finally, it becomes a setting for interaction, meeting and engaging in community activities, one that works in order to form bonds, to contribute to growth, and to foster democratic values.
The building resembles a stack of open books with folded pages: each “book” is formed by a dense structure of wooden panels that face in different directions, defining in this way the lighting of the space and its personality, as well as its functional programme and its urban connections.
The architectural programme is intense and dynamic since it acts as a genuine social condenser, capturing and developing situations that foster the experience of information and the exchange and production of knowledge. Various ecosystems act as spaces for an agora (the showcase at the raised plaza), a forum of ideas (ground floor), dramatised ceremonies (the lower-floor auditorium), the enjoyment of reading like one would at home (reading room), meeting points (central stairway), etc. By accumulation of the different ecosystems, the library forms a warm welcoming space where all visitors can find a comfortable spot for themselves.
There are two clearly differentiated spatial typologies which are visibly defined by their function along the three vertical nuclei made of cross-laminated timber. Firstly, there are closed spaces, with a dense mixed structure of wood and steel which is oriented in accordance with the lighting and views. These spaces are used for the most demanding acoustic experiences, such as the auditorium, radio studio, group working areas, children’s areas, internal working areas and laboratories. Secondly, there are open spaces where most of the structure disappears, giving an impression of spaciousness and lightness while providing unobstructed areas for the main programme, including reference, reading and study areas.
Thanks to the dense hybrid system of the library’s wood and steel structure, the immediately lower level features a broad open space that may be used to host multidisciplinary functional programmes of more social and flexible character, for instant at the auditorium and the interior courtyard. In addition to the welcome and reception space, the ground floor also contains a “forum of ideas”, which is an exchange area that allows the planning and holding of meetings and events of varying sizes and with different levels of privacy, while also favouring the spontaneous occurrence of gatherings.
The “showcase agora” or raised access plaza forms a space that activates the relation with the exterior and appropriates the public space. This is a suitable area for many different activities: film showings, exhibitions, meetings, presentations, concerts, etc. Adjacent to it stands the “topicality bazaar”, which is furnished with transportable modules called “pixels” that can be arranged by users to suit their tastes, acting as seats or supports.
On the upper floor, the “reading house” forms a cosy space that is designed to accommodate a variety of uses: it is an intensification of the domestic space, allowing individual reading with isolated modules or group reading with combinations of furniture units and carpets, just like in a living room. Active reading can also be enjoyed on the terraces, in the garden, in hammocks or in rocking chairs.
The building is laid out in ascending order of functions, from the most public and noisy to the most private, on the basis of three knowledge-related activities: access to information and culture, learning and discovery, and exchange/meeting and reflection/creativity. Carrying out activities in support of lifelong learning (creativity workshops, languages, digital and media literacy, etc.), the library forms part of the local educational ecosystem. It also acts as a space for intergenerational and intercultural exchange and for promoting democratic values and assuring diversity through the programming of activities (Latin American Festival) and the providing of services for vulnerable groups.
The lower floor contains the auditorium, the radio studio, the cooking workshop, and the historical archive, with access to the exterior courtyard. Radio Maconda is a platform open to all Barcelona’s libraries as a podcast, acting as a community radio and a radio school for educational and neighbourhood organisations seeking a radio station where they can share their work and activities.
The intermediate floor, with the children’s and young people’s library, contains the “sensory space”, which forms a stage for the senses, making the experience of oral narration a haptic and auditory process with light, sound, air and movement effects. This fosters perception and communication in a setting of controlled stimuli to favour attention and encourage exploration and discovery among people. The goal is to make the library accessible to people with sensory disorders while promoting a project of experiential and innovative reading.
The figures for this new facility are staggering: as of July 2023, the library has received more than 300,000 visits, an average of more than a thousand people a day, and has carried out almost 200,000 loans. During the first year, more than 6,000 new cards were issued, and more than a hundred activities and workshops were held.