Biblioteca Vasconcelos: The Anti-Library

Mexico City’s Biblioteca Vasconcelos is in many ways the antithesis of a library. It does not sit dormant, filled with unchanging tomes and discourses. It is a work of art housing works of art, a living organism of mutation.

A mohawk of concrete lines and glass walls in the Cuauhtémoc neighborhood, the library invites the outside in. Two stories of windows are covered in the graffiti names of authors, mimicking the aerosol art prominently splashed throughout the city. Twenty-foot tall “Rilke”, “Tolstoy”, and “Cortázar” adorn the library’s façade as a monument to literature.

More than literature, the library’s rotating display of contemporary Mexican art is what makes it unique. Amidst a surreal corridor of bookshelves descending from the ceiling like weightless glass stalactites, visitors find suspended, disassembled pianos, an installed Japanese rock garden filled with television sets, and a dangling four-story spiral of rubber tires entitled “Hasta La Ultima Gota” (To the Last Drop).

Surrounding the library is a verdant botanical garden of palms and bamboo. An enigmatic string of half-buried industrial machinery leads to a defunct manufacturing plant that has been converted into a green house. A waterfall spills down the building’s front, while its guts burst with plant life. In a phenomenal convergence, the garden ascends while the building descends, co-extant where a small forest sprouts from the library’s tailbone. This union befits the library’s refusal to be simply a warehouse for books.

World-renown contemporary artist Gabriel Orozco’s Matrix, a modified whale skeleton, usually adorns the Biblioteca Vasconcelos’ central hall. Currently on the road, it has been temporarily replaced by Caesar Martinez’s brilliant “Sentir de Vació” (To Feel Emptiness), a clear inflatable bubble roughly the same size of Orozco’s whale. The art of vacancy is emblematic of the library, defined by what it is not.

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by William Gish
Gloobbi Architecture

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