Glass cloister: clad in a shimmering glazed skin, Japan's new national library is a dignified modern shrine to the transforming power of knowledge that explores the properties of glass.

Modelled on the US Library of Congress, Japan's National Diet Library was established in 1948. Originally it housed material from the Diet (Japanese parliament) libraries and the Imperial Library, dating back to the latter half of the nineteenth century. After over 50 years it has become the country's library of record and is now striving to preserve and document Japan's cultural heritage. Today its major collections encompass political and constitutional history, legal and parliamentary records, maps, science and technology, rare books, music and foreign publications on Japan. The bulk of the collection was first consolidated in 1968 in a building near the Diet itself in central Tokyo. An annex was added in 1993, but more space was soon needed to cope with an increasing volume of paper publications as well as the challenges presented by electronic media. In 1996 an international competition was held to design a new library, the Kansai-kan, to provide storage and research facilities more attuned to the changing needs of the twenty-first century. From nearly 500 submissions, Tokyo-based Fumio Toki was selected to develop and build his proposal, a shimmering glass volume that seems paradoxically the antithesis of the solidity and monumentality more traditionally associated with the repository of a nation's knowledge.

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As land in central Tokyo is both scarce and costly, the site for the new library lies some 500km away in the wooded Keihanna hills, on the boundary between Japan's two ancient capitals of Kyoto and Nara. The surrounding area is currently being developed as Kansai Science City, an ambitiously conceived research and technology campus begun 15 years ago and still continuing to evolve. Acknowledging the site's historic context and the sensitivity of the landscape, Toki's design takes natural elements such as light, wind, greenery and transparency as its formal cues. It also aims to minimize its impact on its surroundings by placing the main reading room and three floors of bookstacks housing six million volumes (with the capacity for 20 million), below ground in a vast climate-controlled subterranean labyrinth.

In a move that recalls Perrault's Bibliotheque Nationale (AR July 1995), the parallel volumes of the reading room and lobby enclose a sunken tree-planted courtyard, the presence of nature intended to cultivate the necessary sense of monastic detachment required for study. Unlike Perrault, however, who gaily installed France's books in a quartet of patently unsuitable glass towers, here the beautifully crisp Miesian glazed box that constitutes the library's public face contains research and administration spaces. Rising seven storeys above the bookstacks below, the lightness and transparency of the box are delicate foils to the more massive, hermetic storage spaces, an obvious metaphor for the relationship being a flower and its roots. As if to emphasize this, the topmost floor contains a cafeteria overlooking a roof garden, its foliage tantalizingly screened by panels of milkily translucent glass resembling rice paper, so the building appears to be literally in bloom.

The meticulously choreographed approach to the library suggests something of its spatial organization, but it is also intended as a gentle decompression in preparation for the cloistered intensity of study. The transition from campus to library, from the noisy everyday world to a different, almost sacred, realm, is marked by a waterfall and lawn. Visitors traverse a plateau, which is in fact the roof of the reading room, its serrated skylights partly enveloped by grass like some kind of curious artificial meadow. A glazed tunnel set slightly off axis leads down through the treelined courtyard into the entrance lobby, one level below ground. From this tall luminous space, the inner sanctum of the reading room is visible across the courtyard. Despite the building's size, orientation is simple, with different spaces clearly recognizable and logically ordered by the 7.5 X 15m structural grid. Overlooking the courtyard and its picturesquely framed trees, the reading room is a generously proportioned volume illuminated by rows of skylights. Lightwells at lower levels funnel daylight down into the more remote bowels of the building.

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Though its basic form is a simple box, Kansai-kan is by no means an exercise in fashionably lifeless minimalism. The 800mm thick double-skinned glass curtain wall reflects the trees and changing light to become a subtly mutable (and deceptively insubstantial) external membrane. Air handling ducts within the walls are also made of sandblasted tempered glass, so adding to the complex play of reflections. Other materials, such as white stucco for the walls and creamy natural stone for the floors orchestrate textural contrasts and convey a sense of permanence appropriate to a major national institution. Detailing has an understated elegance and imaginative precision that resonates in the calm, dignified spaces. With its monastic study rooms, cathedral-like proportions and aura of tranquillity, the building is a modern, secular shrine to the power of human knowledge, offering the possibility of true enlightenment in an age of increasing anomie.

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