Nine Lights Library

A library that reads as one long room. The roof does the work: nine north lights bring even daylight to every desk and keep the sun off the books.

The site in Aarhus set the terms before we drew anything. The quay is exposed, flat and long, so the building is too. It sits 1.2 m above the old dock level to stay clear of surge tides.

Inside there are no corridors. The reading room, the children's library and the archive open off a single timber-lined hall that runs the length of the plan.

We worked from a 1:50 model for most of the design stage and kept it on site through construction. Where the model and the drawings disagreed, the model usually won.