Plans for a new library at Gothenburg University have been revealed after a search by the Swedish consulting firm Akademiska Hus to add what is now the newest chapter in the long architectural history of the nation’s second-largest city. 

Danish firm Cobe won the commission with a fitting design meant to mimic the curvature of a book’s pages in an imposing 16,000 square meter space adjacent to Gothenburg's most important cultural institutions.

The new building, which will replace smaller libraries serving different academic departments in arts and humanities, uses extruded white ceramic panels to create a volume interposed with vertical patterns that work the building’s profile into an eight-story literary metaphor Cobe founder Dan Stubbergaard feels is central to its function and educational mission.

“The book serves as the inspiration and point of departure for the design,” he said in a statement. “The building volume, its colours and materials all point to a book being opened. Regardless of which direction you approach it from, you are invited in.”

Another metaphor at the heart of the library is its automated book repository, which lends its open-ended plan to users as a reflection on the central role libraries play in the larger machinery of learning that the operation of a university like Gothenburg embodies. The repository sits in the middle of a core ringed by study areas and offices whose carbon-friendly wood construction flows down the facade of the building and into an open ground floor that allows it to peer out over adjacent Näckrosen Park “like a lighthouse on a hill.”

The firm will now add the library to a list of three other major projects around the city'd opening this decade, including the design for Gothenburg’s Botanical Garden and a planned 100 meter tower in the new Masthuggskajen development near the harbour front. 

Construction of the library is set to begin in four years with an opening expected sometime in 2028.