Library in the Želiv Monastery

"Architecture does not imitate nature, but works in the spirit of nature in the way it expresses and distinguishes the bearer from the borne."
"Gravity and strength form the essence of beautiful architecture."
Arthur Schopenhauer

The Premonstratensian monastery in Želiv has undergone numerous transformations and turns since its founding in the 12th century. After fires, it was restored several times, most significantly in the 18th century by J. B. Santini. In the 1950s, it served as a so-called internment collection camp, where the communist regime detained priests and religious. Adjacent to the monastery church is a one-story convent with a square floor plan, where an expansive room with frescoes—formerly a library—can be found on the upper floor. Unfortunately, the original wooden shelves have not survived to this day. Our task was to design a new library for the placement of a large number of valuable books.
Our concept works with the load of books and symbolically unfolds the form of the library into support and burden. It consists of a modular system of concrete supports and metal shelves, which provide overall order to the assembly, resulting from structural necessity and gravity. The collection of preserved books is not complete; however, there was a requirement for maximum presentation of the entire book collection. For this reason, their arrangement by size was chosen to fully utilize the space. The heights of the shelves correspond to the sizes of individual books, with the shelves arranged from the tallest in the lower row to the shortest in the upper. The concrete supports also respond in height to the size of the books, and in views, they are composed in the proportions of the golden ratio. The supports were cast directly on site, using gravel and pebbles from the Želivka River. Our goal was to imprint the place into the architecture itself. We understand the act of construction as a process that creates the final work through a series of steps. The entire system was assembled like a building block over several days, without the need for anchoring to existing historical structures. In contemplating a new form of the library within the historical space of the monastery, we were especially interested in working with weight, order, and the process during implementation. In the center of the room, there is a table—a three-meter metal plate on which selected open books are presented under thirteen covers. Our intention was to symbolically evoke the impression of some kind of feast at the table, as the monastery dining hall is located directly below the library.