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Kraufmann/Susanne Kern / Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart
The new central library in Stuttgart, Germany, has joined the Mercedes-Benz Museum as a major local attraction.
E-readers such as Kindle or Nook may be hot holiday gifts this season, but that doesn't mean libraries are a thing of the past. In fact, with architecturally significant buildings, exhibitions and a wide range of amenities, the public libraries in many cities rank alongside museums and other cultural attractions as must-see destinations for many travelers.
Here are five libraries worth a visit:
Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart
The new central library in Stuttgart, Germany, has an all-white floor plan.
Stuttgart Central Library, Stuttgart, Germany
Officially dedicated at the end of November, the new central library in Stuttgart, Germany, has joined the Mercedes-Benz Museum as a major local attraction. Designed by Korean architect Eun Young Yi, the Stadtbibliothek is a nine-story, cubed, glass block structure that looks staid and grey during the day but glows iridescent blue at night. Inside, an open, all-white floor plan pushes the books to the perimeter, surrounding the children’s library and the multi-zoned reading, research and gathering spaces.
Don’t miss: To emphasize that this new facility is open to all, the word "Library" is written in English on the outer wall of one side of the building and written in German, Korean and Arabic on the other three.
Seattle Public Library
The Seattle Central Library, which opened in 2004, has become one of the city's most visited attractions.
Central Library, Seattle, Washington
When it opened in 2004, the New York Times’ Herbert Muschamp described the downtown Central Library in Seattle, Wash., as “a blazing chandelier to swing your dreams upon.”
Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas, the unusually-shaped steel and glass building with 30 miles of books arranged in an ingenious ‘Books Spiral’ has become one of the city’s most visited attractions. “More than 2 million people visit the Central Library year,” said Seattle Public Library spokesperson Andra Allison. “You can’t go anywhere in the building without seeing tourists with cameras.”
Don’t miss: Take a guided or self-guided tour, but don’t miss the view from the 10th floor.
Courtesy British Library
With more than 150 million items, London's British Library is one of the world's largest.
British Library, London
With more than 150 million items, London’s British Library is one of the world's largest and most comprehensive. In addition to public tours and events, the library displays world treasures from a collection that includes the 1215 Magna Carta, Leonardo da Vinci’s notes on architecture and arithmetic, illuminated manuscripts and Shakespeare’s First Folio.
Don’t miss: Current exhibitions explore the role of supernatural phenomena in the work of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘lost’ novel.
Nicolai Perjesi / Courtesy Wonderful Copenhagen
Denmark's Royal Library holds printed Danish works dating back to 1482.
Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark
Founded in 1648, Denmark’s Royal Library holds printed Danish works dating back to 1482. The original 1906 library building on Copenhagen’s harbor was expanded in 1999 with an angular, shiny black granite addition now referred to as the Black Diamond. Today, the library is one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions and is home to the National Museum of Photography, a 600-seat concert hall with its own 10-member ensemble, a garden, a roof-top terrace and several exhibition spaces.
Don’t miss: Public tours of the old and new library buildings are offered each Saturday afternoon at 3 p.m.
Benoit Doppagne / AFP/Getty Images
The Trinity College Library's Long Room contains oak bookcases filled with 200,000 of the library's oldest books.
Trinity College Library, Dublin, Ireland
Dublin’s Trinity College Library is Ireland’s largest. It’s also one of the country’s biggest tourist attractions, mostly because the library is home to the Book of Kells, a lavishly decorated, four-volume illuminated manuscript created by Celtic monks in the 9th century. Two volumes are displayed to the public at a time: one is open to a significant, decorated page; another shows two pages of script.
Don’t miss: In addition to the Book of Kells and other related manuscripts, visitors may tour the library’s Long Room, which contains oak bookcases filled with 200,000 of the library’s oldest books, a collection of marble busts depicting writers, philosophers and men connected with the college and Ireland’s oldest harp, which dates to the 15th century.
Which special libraries have you visited in your travels? Tell us in the comments section below.
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Find more by Harriet Baskas on StuckatTheAirport.com and follow her on Twitter.
Leave a Comment:
Nesto novo u svijetu...
toliko knjiga, tako malo vremena
The Library of Congress in Washington DC, spectacular for the architecture and interior as well as the exhibits.
Yale University's Beineke (sp?) Rare Book and Manuscript Library, with it's translucent marble walls is worth going out of your way to visit. The sun shining through the white marble wall panels, set in a gray granite framework, creates a surprisingly orange/rose light in the interior.
The Alexandria library. Egypt, not Maryland. On the site of the ancient library that was the world's greatest. Now it's a great, modern library that is also a museum of the arts - multi-media and multi-cultural. Great architecture, great atmosphere. Must-see when visiting Egypt.
Libraries are a thing of the past. It is nearly 2012 get with the program
Craig,
Your comment was rude, crude, small-minded, selfish, boorish and completely lacking in any social grace or civic mors. I cannot say enough negative adjectives to describe your complete self-centered lack of foresight where it applies to the lack of community your comment takes in.
The written word, the printed word, is one of man's greatest achievements. If we depart from the way of the printed word, our society will decline if not disappear. All it will take is one good serious EMP, and a society based upon the digital word will vanish.
Information that take no effort to acquire is held cheaply by those in whose "hands" it is contained. As an educator and an instructor over the last 25 years, I have seen the change in the classroom attendees (I will not grace them with the term of learners or students because they were, in the overwhelming majority, not). Too many people today are only and simply degreed; they did not go to college/university and become educated. The number of persons that attend tertiary educational institutions, and graduate them as an educated "adult" American citizen is declining every year. Almost all of these degreed "adults" did was the minimum necessary to acquire their degrees, many times with the minimum necessary GPA as well. All too often I would ask these people before they left the institution I was at, "Where is the library?" and they could not, for their lives, tell me where it was on campus or in the city.
To have a truly educated citizenry, which is what the Founding Fathers presumed their state would have (that lack is why our system is breaking down so often from), requires much greater effort and desire than what Craig and so many others like him exhibit. It requires continuing education at all times in life. It does not come from pop generation culture with their fixation on being spoon-fed, on playing video games continuously , on what feels good right now and on the "What's in it for me?" attitude that the last two generations have exhibited. These generations would have been unable to win the Second World War, let alone able to set up a national system like ours today. They have neither the selfless drive nor the civic sense of responsibility to others to establish our system, and it is really questionable if they can sustain the one made for them over 200 years ago.
People like Craig are thoroughly depressing for the actual American citizens out there. The Craigites supply no hope for the future on this great nation, let alone for the human race.
Doug, you read a lot into a few words. Craig merely observed that at this time, the need of a fixed, centralized building called a library is simply not as great as it once was. And that comment was hidden, in another example of democracy at work!!
@Craig-2249226.....Boo, Hiss.
I would travel to any of these places JUST to see the libraries.
Carnegie Libraries. They're all over the place. I would like to return to the University of Oregon's Knight Library: art collections, rare books areas, and more.
But any library, any time!
But if I could go into a fictious one, it would be the one Garth Nix created in his book Lirael., It has special collections, including a glacier, that Hogwarts library doesn't have. (Haven't been to Discworld yet, so can't comment on it.)
Also, see special events list at http://www.ava.org/clubs/holyfamilywalkers/carnegie_libraries_special_event.htm
I'd love to see any of those libraries and several that aren't listed as well. As for you people who think libraries are a thing of the past, I'll bet you haven't been in one for a while. We do a heck of a job keeping up with the times and can offer the public plenty of information from resources they don't have access to or aren't necessarily aware of, even the most computer savvy. I'm just a little biased being the director of a library myself.
Please save the libraries--all of them in your home town, at your college or university.
Read and honor the books and printed word. They are treasures to behold and cannot compare with the fad of today: Kindle, Nook, etc. etc.
Hold that book in your hand. Smell the pages, turn the pages. Read the pages.
Read to your children and grandchildren from books and stories you read as a child.
The Library of Congress (Jefferson Building)in Washington D.C is magnificent!
The Library of Congress (Jefferson Building) in Washington D.C. is magnificant!
Any number of the Oxbridge academic college libraries are well worth visiting for their historic aesthetic, such as Pepy's Library in Cambridge, and Oxford's medieval Bodleian Library is without peer. The ancient Abbey Library in St. Gallen, Switzerland will make you breathless. The modern National Library of Quebec in Montréal is quite remarkable as well in terms of light and spaciousness. And an autumn view of the Berkshires mountain foliage from the 18th floor of the DeBois Library at UMass-Amherst is not easily forgotten.
Personally I hate modern libraries.
UC San Diego library. It looks like a spaceship.
I may sound biased being from Ann Arbor, but the University of Michigan libraries (ANY of them!) are good to visit-the Law library is second only to Oxford Law library in number of law volumes in the world! (and the "stacks" are cool!!)
I'm just a sucker for old architecture...
The public library in Lackawanna, NY. It wouldn't mean much to most people, but as a boy, I got book after book there, and grew to love them. I still do. Every few years when I am in the area, I revisit it, and all the memories come back. Perhaps other people would like to revisit the libraries of their childhood...
NYC main library - a must see - has an excellent tour
If you think that libraries are of no value, then you should consider countries who realize the value of libraries. They surpass the USA in quality of education and research by miles. Wake up, Americans!
University of Warsaw Library in Warsaw, Poland. It has an expansive multilevel roof top garden with bridges, ponds, benches, plants, trees, flowers and breathtaking views of Warsaw. It is open to the public, with more information available at the University of Warsaw web site.