OMA is certainly on a roll these days when it comes to winning commissions for spectacular public spaces. The famed architectural firm headed by Rem Koolhaus recently revealed their winning design for the Bibliothèque Multimédia à Vocation Régionale (BMVR), an incredible new library to be located on the tip of the peninsula of Caen, France. The BMVR will mark the firm’s first cultural building in France with an area of nearly 130,000 square feet across two intersecting masses clad in gleaming floor to ceiling windows. Underscored by a sustainable design program, the new structure will feature an energy efficient system able to respond to local climactic conditions and confluent floor plans that will both maximize natural light and create a comfortable and inspiring atmosphere for visitors to convene and be enlightened.
The form of the new structure will be positioned on an intersecting axis, with radiating points that give reference to the city’s four famed landmarks — the Abbaye-Aux-Dames, the Abbaye-Aux-Hommes’, the central train station, and a key site set to host a new major city redevelopment plan. The intersection of the two blocks will also allow for optimized circulation and an intimate intermingling between the reading rooms, multi-disciplinary collections and the patrons of the library themselves.
Truly a building designed for public use and enrichment, the BMVR will be well integrated in the cityscape opening up to the park, pedestrian walkways and the waterfront. As Philippe Duron, Président Communauté D’Agglomération Caen la Mer states, ”To build a library today is to believe in the future of our society, to acknowledge a desire to give everyone the tools to participate in our information age. For Caen and its surrounding region, the library makes physical, embodies, this desire. The library symbolizes both the international ambition of urban development and gives focus to the major renaissance of the peninsula. The architectural quality and intellectual influence of the BMVR will make it a flagship of its region.”
+ OMA
