Library in Beidaihe
- Heide Wessely
In Beidaihe, a coastal resort roughly three hours’ drive from Beijing, this “seashore library” provides a cultural amenity for the 70,000 inhabitants and for holiday guests. The individual spaces are designed in quite different ways. The bright reading room, for example, descends in a series of steps on which one can sit. The powerful steel lattice girder that bears the load of the concrete roof is concealed behind hand-cast glass blocks that break the light in different ways. Thanks to this girder, the broad panorama window remains column-free, allowing an unimpeded view of the ocean. When the glazed doors are open to the beach, one can feel and smell the fresh sea breeze at the back of the room. The meditation space is of quite a different character. Here, two narrow slits direct light on to the wall and floor, where otherwise the untreated exposed concrete conveys a sense of peace and shelter. The space used for miscellaneous events is also indirectly lighted, and since it can sometimes be loud there, it is separated from the quiet zones by a terrace, from where there is access to the roof via a narrow staircase. The texture and coloration of the concrete surfaces were tested, before C35/40 concrete was chosen with a water/cement cooefficient of 0.38 and a 42 per cent sand content. The softwood boarded formwork creates a timber grained effect, and the concrete was allowed to press out through the cracks, underlining the horizontal texture.
