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About the Library building

The first separate library building at the Warsaw University was erected in 1895, during the Russian occupation. It was a typical tripartite library designed for about 750,000 items. This capacity was exceeded in the thirties. Plans for a new edifice were being pushed for next 50 years, but never came into being. When Poland became a democracy, in 1989 we had initially the idea of moving our Library to a the huge and monumental office building belonging to the former communist party, but it appeared impossible for technical reasons. Then, the government with prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki decided to rent this building to certain financial and commercial institutions (among others Warsaw Stock Exchange) and to use income thus generated to finance the construction of a new library building.

The city of Warsaw responded by granting the University a piece of land between the main campus and the bank of Vistula. Then, new requirements were written down by the Library, with the open stacks as the essential novelty. An architectural contest followed in 1993. We received fifty designs, most of them full of very interesting, creative solutions. The design by Marek Budzyński & Zbigniew Badowski, was awarded with 1st prize and plans went ahead to see the design through.

What did the architects have for the librarians? The main theme could be described as "a city in woods" - a library surrounded by botanical gardens, with plants covering the sides and the roof of the structure, and the main entrance to the library hidden in a "Lane" - a glass-covered North-South (roughly) pedestrian passage with main entrances on both ends, leading to office space for rent on the Western side and the actual library on the eastern side. The building has 4 storeys and 2 additional storeys below the ground level. The lowest level is used as a parking lot, the second lowest level is temporarily rented out as a bowling center, and it will accomodate an extra compact storage in the future, so it is not likely the library will be in need of space before the demise of printed book.

The building is designed on a 7.20 meter grid.The whole structure is reinforced concrete, glass, stainless steel and chemically treated copper (to produce an ageing effect). The building is air conditioned, and the pipes and installations are not hidden - an effect which most librarians wholeheartedly disliked. A white suspended ceiling was used in the reading areas, and in the corridors linking the offices of the library staff only. The presence of fine concrete is overwhelming. The carpet is grey, and the open access areas shelves are silverish, which leaves colour to be added to the library by books and by people who use it.

Central to the building is a large atrium serving as a catalogue hall. Stacks are located on galleries. Over the catalogue hall the galleries are finished with glossy stainless steel railings that enhance its spaciousness and allow patrons approaching them an unrestricted view across as well as up and down.

The catalogue hall and the reading room are on the West-East axis, perpendicular to the "Lane", and daylight-lit because of the glass roof and a plexiglass cupola over the passage from the atrium to the reading room. In the Lane, on the West-East axis there is an entrance to the library: a gate in a glass wall, and then an electronic gate to prevent theft of library materials. On the ground level only a big exhibition and conference room, a cloakroom and a restaurant are accessible to the public; what extends eastwards and southwards from them is a compact storage area, a preservation and conservation lab, a service entrance, a pull-up area for library and restaurant supplies, and offices of the acquisitions department. From the public entrance, huge staircase leads to the 1st level (the ground level being numbered "0"), 3.60 meters above the ground, accomodating the catalog hall, the open stacks area at the Northern and Eastern part of the building, a reference desk (Informatorium), a circulation desk, a student textbook collection with a separate circulation desk, an interlibrary loan office, and rooms used by the reference department. The offices in the Southern part are inaccessible from the public area of the structure.

The second level, 7.20 meters above the ground level, is accessible by side helical stairs of the same material and pattern as the railings, as well as by the main staircase, built along the axis of the structure and providing a visual extension of the entrance staircase. This leads to the reading room (A, Z subject area) ahead, and open stacks all around. The running periodicals are located in the South-East part of the building, with an additional cylindric source of daylight for all the three levels above zero. The rest of the area is filled with stacks. This level also accomodates the computer department, offices, and the library administration.

The third level, elevated to 10.80 meters, is dedicated to special collections. It has to be added here that special collections in Poland are not exactly special collections in the UK or USA or Sondersammlungen in Germany: they are mostly historic items, so the name of "rare books" would not necessarily be more appropriate. Let us just name them as they are our treasures. They are:
- Print Collection
- Early Imprints Department
- Manuscripts Department
- Maps Collection
- Ephemera Collection
- Music Collection.

Thus the Southern part, on the right to a person entering the Library, is something like an inner city: a labyrinth of smaller reading rooms, studios, offices, and closed storage areas. Also it has an exhibition room, the only room here with no magnetic card necessary for a user to get into (the cards will be issued to entitled users at the entrance).

And this is not an end of this level. On the left a regular open stacks area was planned, but we decided to seek a way to fence it in and to make it accomodate a newly established 19th Century Department. We have long felt that our 19th century holdings are worth a better place than the general store and better finding tool than the general catalogue provided.

The Library is impressive to look at. The façade, carrying a huge elevated inscription "Biblioteka Uniwersytecka", is partitioned by 4 passageways meeting at the Lane, near the main internal entrance to the Library. Underneath the inscription there are 8 big copper panels, 4 to 7 meters, showing the realm of knowledge, memory, and writing. There are excerpts from Polish Renaissance writer Jan Kochanowski, from Plato, from an old-Russian chronicle, from Arabic and Indian classics, from the Bible; there is a score by composer Karol Szymanowski (one of this Library's treasures) and sample mathematical formulas.

At the Lane, approaching the entrance, the sight is dominated by the glass structures, resembling aquariums, of the level 1 - the interlibrary loan on the right, and the "neutral" reading space on the left. Straight ahead, at the top of the stairs, there are four monumental columns with statues (concrete sculptures by Adam Myjak) of eminent Polish philosophers. Having climbed the stairs, the user may find the passage between the columns as somewhat embarassing, but the architects are correct to say that this is symbolic hardships incident to knowledge acquisition.

From this point, the Library is nothing but inviting. Having entered the lobby, the patron will be able to consult immediatly his or her "first contact" librarian, available behind a semi-circular desk on the right. Also, attached to slim colums inside the catalog hall, special banners point to subject areas and their LC symbols, as listed above. Practically all areas can actually all be seen from that point, providing a striking effect of transparency to a building which covers a very wide area.