Volume of volumes.

This library pressed tightly into the fabric of the old city provides a new internal public space for the service of all citizens.

The new Granada public library is a big white box approximately 40 m wide and 60 m long which is crammed tight into its site in the Alfoz area of the city. The architects argue that this is in a tradition in which large buildings like the Jeronimas convent and the Asilo de las Hermanitas have been pressed into the tight urban tissue, leaving narrow streets and courts round about.

The whole of the ground floor of the box is of glass, which varies in height according to the level of the ground. Entrance is from the north-west and south-east sides up elegant curved steps to mezzanine level. Once past the control points, you arrive in a huge volume which stretches from the ground floor to the top of the building. It is lit by a diagonally gridded horizontal roof lantern that pours light into the whole large volume, where first, mezzanine and ground floors are thrown together in a series of terraces. As Carmen Mostaza (one of the three architects) explains: `in the general development of European libraries there is a trend towards increased direct user access to books as well as a significant rise in books on loan. This has led to a relative decrease in static reading areas. [There is] a trend towards a more itinerant use of library space. Within the large dimensions of a library, this leads to a dangerous risk of maze-like complexity and loss of orientation'.

It was to combat this risk that the building has been given such a strong figure. The nave-like properties of the long volume are emphasised by pairs of slender white tubular columns and Mostaza suggests that the `large central space is underscored by a series of concentric peristyles [of square white concrete columns] which deal with the Islamic ambiguity of the large isotropic reading room with a western, lineal conception of space'.

The periphery of the huge volume is partly surrounded to the north-eastern end by arcades lit by a large area of glass that cuts up into the floating white box. The south and west corners of the box are similarly carved away by glass to illuminate wells that, through layers of structure, bring a veiled daylight to the interior: so lighting the entrance to the auditorium at ground floor in the middle of the volume.

The theatre falls through a couple of floors of basement to stage level, while its roof rises to become a level just below the mezzanine. There is a great deal of finesse in handling all the levels of the big volume. Detailing is designed to emphasise its terraced nature and enhance the light falling from the roof: floors are of white terrazzo, structural elements are painted white.

In counterpoint to the soaring columns, the bookshelves are in dark brown hardwood to emphasise the horizontality of the terraces. Shelf supports and all the balustrades are sparingly and reticently delineated in stainless steel - though some people are bound to catch their sleeves on the ends of the elegantly turned stair balustrades.

The most curious place in the whole building is the top reference floor, a thin horizontal slice of space connected to the great volume only by the footprint of the central skylight which punches through it and allows light to spill into it from the internal sides round the well. The outer walls of this level are virtually unpenetrated, and the rest of the floor is lit by rooflights.

Save for this floor, which only takes part in the general spatial conversation at a most acute angle, all other levels are interpenetrating and interconnected.

Mostaza's ambition of creating a building which is legible from virtually all points has been realised. But the result is far from being an anonymous desert, as it might have been if a similar ambition had been pursued some 50 or 60 years ago. In addition to the great nave, the building is full of particular places which vary in their qualities according to orientation and the penetration of light. The masterly handling of complex levels and spaces is reminiscent (on a relatively small scale) of the topography of the ancient city that surrounds it.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]