What makes a library special so that it can be considered the best in the world? The funds, the environment, its architecture… a mixture of that “everything” offered by the Gabriel García Márquez in Barcelona, which is nominated for the Best Public Library of 2023, an international award that recognizes the work and ambition of these spaces for the promotion of reading and thinking.
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Inaugurated in May 2022 as the central library of the Barcelona district of Sant Martí, the BGGM is a spectacular six-story building with an exposed wooden structure of almost 4,000 square meters, a large “house” that seems to hang and half-hidden among the tall banana trees that surround her and invite her to cross the threshold.
Once that step is taken, the interior surprises even more for its light, for its structure, with an open patio to which the successive floors look out as if they were balconiesa kind of corral from which the open spaces hang and other cubicles that allow creating intimacy based on gauze curtains that hang from the ceiling or screens, all full of nooks and crannies to discover.
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Specializing in Latin American literature, the library bears the name of the Colombian Nobel Prize for Literature, who lived in Barcelona from 1967 to 1975, and serves as the headquarters of the KM Amèrica Festival of Latin American Literature, which is in its second edition.
The SUMA Arquitectura studio, in charge of the project, has already received the 2022 Ciutat de Barcelona Architecture Award for the design of the building, which is now also nominated for Best Public Library awarded by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA).
The director of the Gabriel García Márquez Library, Neus Castellano, explains to EFE that Libraries inaugurated each year usually submit their candidacy for this prestigious recognition (which also includes a modest cash prize of 4,200 euros) to which hundreds of centers throughout the world opt..
The Barcelonan passed the first filter with 16 other nominees and reached the final together with the Public Library Janez Vajkard Valvasor Krškov (Slovenia), the City of Parramatta Library (Australia) and the Shanghai Library East (China), of which the winner as of August 21 at the IFLA congress held in Rotterdam (Holland).
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The latest award-winning libraries have been the Missoula Public Library (USA), the Deichman Bjorvika (Norway) and the Oodi Helskinki Central Library (Filandia).
As a result of the nomination, he has been produced as a kind of library tourist easily identifiable because he enters looking up.
The BGGM belongs to the Barcelona public library network (which has around forty spaces) and is the first to be built entirely of wood, with a capacity for 40,000 books and audiovisual documents in the room (it now has 32,000) and 10,000 more in deposit.
Castellano points out that the real prize – it is not “a cliché”, he insists – is the people who go to the library: 1,100 people on average per day, a figure that has been increasing since his candidacy was announced.
“As a result of the nomination, it has been produced as a kind of library tourist easily identifiable because it enters looking up”, reveals the director of this brand new facility, “much in demand by the residents” and which serves an environment of about 55,000 residents of the La Verneda-La Pau neighborhoods.
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Thanks to its constructive DNA and its “atypical” spaces, the Gabriel García Márquez aspires to follow the model that many experts in the management of these venues are now betting on: that libraries move towards what they call the third space.
“The third space that is neither your place of work or study nor your home, but is the way for a library to be a comfortable place where you can sit and read for hours, not just for a book loan”.
For this reason, beyond the typical tables and chairs of a conventional library, which there are also, in the BGGM “There are sofas, we have armchairs, we have a hammock, swings, beanbags and that makes people use the space differently”says the person in charge of this venue, which also has a radio studio.
“What this award recognizes is, basically, the building, not a trajectory but a project that begins, although in this case there was a previous space (in another location) and that rooting is also valued, in addition to its sustainability, the way of build it, its energy efficiency systems, the flexibility of spaces… which makes, in the end, everything more respectful of the planet”, sums up the director.
A deep-rootedness that these days has been revealed with the death of the cartoonist Francisco Ibáñez, a resident of the neighborhood to whom the library dedicated a special permanent corner with his works since its inauguration, and who after his death, on July 15, was It has become a pilgrimage destination for its followers, eager to pay homage to one of the great promoters of reading in Spain.
EFE
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