Like a climatic refuge among books they rise, in the middle of the district of Sant Marti, the six diaphanous and luminous floors, dominated by exposed wood and large windows, of the enormous Garcia Marquez Library, inaugurated in May 2022 at the corner of Calle del Treball and Concilio de Trento. The brand new installation of almost 4,000 square meters, which last year already won the City of Barcelona Award for Architecturehas become this Monday, August 21, the Best Public Library of 2023, an award given by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), which will issue its verdict in Rotterdam (Holland), within the framework of the 88th World Congress of Libraries and Information.
The center, a large and comfortable structure of nordic design with open spaces, work of the architects Elena Orte and Guillermo Sevillano, from SUMA Arquitectura, won the other finalists, the Public Library Janez Vajkard Valvasor Krškov (Slovenia), the City of Parramatta Library (Australia) and the Shanghai Library East (China). By winning the IFLA award, it has become the first Spanish public library to do so.
Until last May, it had received a total of 277,578 visits (an average of 947 people a day), lent 128,695 documents, created 6,000 cards for new users and hosted 75 activities (conferences, meetings with writers, poetry recitals, reading clubs, workshops …) attended by 4,000 people.
With a collection of 40,000 books and documentsthe library is specialized in Latin American literature and pays homage already from the very name to the Colombian Nobel Prize for Literature Gabriel García Márquez: an 80×65 bronze bust of the author of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ presides over one of the spaces, recalling his work and his links with Barcelona, the city where he lived between 1967 and 1975 and where he was one of the protagonists of the so-called ‘boom’ in the 60s and 70s, which emerged under the wing of the agent Carmen Balcells.
Numerous users occupied the various spaces of the library this week of the summer heat of the August holiday, designed as a multifunctional cultural and proximity facility for residents and which meets the criteria that IFLA values most, such as interaction with the social environment and local culture, the architectural quality of the building, the flexibility of the spaces and services, sustainability or digitization.
The photographed hammock
Comfortable reading areas with a variety of armchairs, chairs and spaces to sit down, including an already famous and photographed hammock, are distributed throughout the spaces, where there are a good number of computers and more and less reserved places to settle down to read, even running some semi-transparent circular curtains to isolate yourself with more privacy, or resorting to a couple of small terraces.
Sustainability
Inside the building, which evokes a set of stacked books, the open spaces and all the uses of the six floors are conveyed and connected around a wide central staircase in a triangular interior patio. Natural light enters through it from a large skylight. Wood from controlled reforestation, recyclable materials such as polyurethane resin and fiberglass slats, large windows, light, facilities for energy efficiency and water consumption (they recover rainwater to irrigate the vegetation) or the use of panels photovoltaics on the roof contribute to the sustainability of the project, which reached almost 12 million euros.
The Francisco Ibáñez fund
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Among the usual thematic sections in a library (children’s and youth, fiction and non-fiction, comics, newspaper library, cinema and music…) a space expressly dedicated to one of the illustrious residents of Sant Martí stands out: Francisco Ibanez, who passed away last July. Of the mythical cartoonist of comics has met a comic book background of all his characters and the history of the Bruguera publishing house. Since his death, accompanies the titles of him a book of condolences and tribute to the teacher. On its pages, García Márquez users, young and old, have written and drawn -the ‘mortadelos’ win by a landslide-, their thanks to Rompetechos’s father for having given them so many smiles.
Since its inauguration, which is the third largest library of the 40 in Barcelona (after Jaume Fuster and Ignasi Iglésias-Can Fabra), has hosted the KM America Latin American Literature Festivalhouses the first platform open to the Barcelona library network through podcasts, called Ràdio Maconda (a nod to the fictional town created by García Márquez) and has an assembly room and the Sensory Space (experience with electronic devices).