Weifang Campus Library

The main library for a new university encloses a sequence of dynamic multilevel public spaces in a thickened, functional box. Serving 20,000 students, the library is located within WORKac’s masterplan for a new educational district near Weifang, China.

The building is a simple rectilinear volume with an angled base that extends to address the main campus quad. Wrapping the volume’s periphery, a zone of bookstacks and study rooms creates a large sunlit atrium at the library’s center. A series of “tubes,” programmed as reading rooms, computer labs, gathering spaces or gardens, traverse the atrium and extend to puncture the library’s exterior facades. At two corners of the main volume, where tubes intersect, larger cuts create terraced gardens.