BOOK CELL: A Shortlisted Library That Breaks the Book Apart into Cells for Reading, Research and Public Life

What happens to a library when nobody needs to visit it to find a book? BOOK CELL starts from that question. Its answer is to open the book, tear it into pieces and turn each fragment into a room. The result is not a reading hall. It is a cluster of stacked, suspended and intersecting volumes, and the spaces between them matter as much as the rooms. Trees, terraces and walkways slip through the gaps, so the building works less as a container for printed matter and more as a landscape you can wander through.

Designed by Amin Farhoudi and shortlisted in BookMark 2020, the proposal responds to the declining popularity of conventional libraries in a society shaped by digital books, mobile devices and online databases. Farhoudi does not reject that shift. He argues that a physical library has to absorb technological change while keeping its social, cultural and spatial value. Books stay in the programme, but they now sit alongside digital research, seminars, performances, immersive media and informal learning. Students, researchers, residents and passing pedestrians are all treated as legitimate visitors.

Rectangular Fragments Stacked, Suspended and Thrown Over the Plaza

The street view shows the concept at its most legible. Concrete and glass boxes sit on top of one another, some planted firmly on the ground and others cantilevered out over the plaza. Each box is one page of the fragmented book, a self-contained cell holding its own programme. The cyclist and pedestrians moving beneath the overhangs explain the strategy well: the building does not ask you to walk through a front door before it starts working on you. Its edges are already occupied public space.

The massing is restless on purpose. Farhoudi reads contemporary knowledge as distributed and non-linear, arriving through books, conversations, networks and simulations at once, and the composition turns that idea into form. No single volume dominates. Meaning comes from how the pieces relate, which is a fair spatial description of how information now moves.

A Shaded Courtyard Where Trees Meet Digital Presence

Below the glass volumes, the large voids between blocks become a shaded courtyard. Trees grow through it, and people sit and stand in soft, filtered light. This is the social floor of the project, where the quieter cells above give way to a space for meeting and lingering. The voids carry light, vegetation, views and foot traffic deep into the composition, so the ground plane reads as a public room rather than leftover space.

The ghostly wireframe figures mixed in with the rendered people are the most suggestive detail in the set. They point to the technology-driven learning and immersive media the programme calls for, as if digital users were sharing the courtyard with physical ones. Whether that is meant literally or as a metaphor, it makes the brief's central tension visible: a library that has to host bodies and data in the same place.

Bridges and Terraces That Stitch the Cells into a Network

If each cell is a separate piece of knowledge, the bridges are the arguments that join them. The glazed facade view shows a cantilevered bridge volume spanning open ground, with transparent circulation that lets people inside see out and lets the plaza see in. This openness supports the programme's balance. Individual reading spaces can stay protected from noise and movement, while seminar rooms, open terraces and public zones carry conversation and group activity. Separation and connection are both designed, not left to chance.

The aerial view shows the roofscape as a second ground. Stepped concrete platforms hold planted trees, and glass-gridded blocks rise between them, giving a multi-level landscape where architecture, nature and digital media overlap. The terraces matter because they give the building a reason to visit that has nothing to do with borrowing a book. Visitors can come for the view, the shade or a public event and discover the reading cells on their way.

Why This Project Matters

Many library proposals answer the digital question by adding a media lab to a familiar building. BOOK CELL goes further and changes the building's structure to match a changed idea of knowledge. Breaking the book into modular cells gives Farhoudi a clear way to let silence and noise, privacy and assembly, print and screen sit side by side without diluting one another. The library becomes an active cultural institution where people create, interpret, discuss and exchange information, not a passive archive.

The open questions are the ones any fragmented scheme faces: how the cells are organised internally, how the bridges perform as everyday routes, and how the planted terraces are kept alive over time. As a competition statement, though, the proposal makes its case. It treats the public library's future as a problem of urban landscape and social life rather than shelving, and it suggests that the best reason to visit a library may be everything that happens between the books.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Amin Farhoudi

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Project credits: BOOK CELL by Amin Farhoudi BookMark 2020 (uni.xyz).