Cyber Library: A BookMark 2020 Shortlist That Builds a Porous Library From 2 Metre Modules

If information is already available almost everywhere, what is a library building actually for? Cyber Library starts from that uncomfortable question and gives a direct answer: experience, interaction and community. The project borrows the figure of the cyborg, a body in which the natural and the artificial can no longer be cleanly separated, and turns it into a spatial principle. In this proposal, the shelf, the garden, the stair and the conversation are no longer assigned to separate rooms. They overlap.

Designed by Yifan Su and Yumeko, the project was shortlisted in BookMark 2020. Rather than a container for a controlled collection, the scheme proposes an evolving public framework on a sloping site. It is organised around a modular prototype based on a 2 metre by 2 metre spatial unit and spread across several interconnected levels that work with the terrain.

A Street Front That Reads as Glass, Garden and Stacked Light

The street facade sets out the project's argument before anyone steps inside. Glazed lower floors expose activity to the pavement, a planted terrace interrupts the elevation, and stepped translucent box volumes rise against the night sky like lanterns. Nothing here resembles the solid, inward-looking civic library. The building is staged to be seen through, and that matters for a scheme whose whole premise is drawing in people who did not come to read.

This is the All-in-One idea expressed as an elevation. The designers describe the library as a reading environment, leisure destination, creative centre and gallery at the same time. A visitor might arrive for an exhibition, a meeting or a garden and only later find the books. The facade does the recruiting: it reads as an invitation rather than an instruction, which is the designers' own phrase and a fair description of what the render achieves.

Shelves, Scaffold and a Staircase That Refuses to Stay Put

Inside, the conventional hierarchy of the reading room starts to come apart. Timber bookshelves share the hall with a steel scaffold reading frame, and a white staircase appears to float through the volume while readers sit close by. The scaffold is the most telling element. It has the language of something provisional and adjustable, closer to an armature for occupation than a piece of furniture, and it lets reading happen inside the structure rather than at tables set apart from it.

The project explicitly rejects the classic library's behavioural zoning, where books belong to shelves, readers to desks and librarians to the information system. Here, reading can sit beside conversation, and books are framed as objects of exchange rather than holdings to be guarded. The floating stair makes circulation part of the reading experience: moving through the room becomes a way of discovering what it holds, which is precisely the role the designers assign to circulation.

Terraces and Gaps That Turn a Slope Into a Sequence

The corner view shows how the 2 metre module negotiates the ground. The glazed frame and planted terraces step across a white sloping site, so the building takes on the terrain level by level instead of flattening it with a single podium. The red moon in the sky is pure atmosphere, but the strategy beneath it is practical: because the modules can be recombined according to terrain, environmental conditions and programme, the prototype claims an adaptability that a fixed typology cannot offer. The terraces also put gardens into the reading environment directly, which keeps the nature side of the cyborg idea literal rather than decorative.

The final image is the most compelling of the set. Two white volumes pull apart to leave a narrow gap crossed by a slender stair and a bridge, with two figures climbing between them. This is where the modular logic produces something genuinely spatial. The leftover space between units becomes a route, a moment of compression and a small threshold for encounter. If the project has a signature space, it is not a grand atrium but this sliver of passage, where discovery happens on the way from one part of the library to another.

Why This Project Matters

Many library competition entries treat the digital shift as a reason to add screens. Cyber Library takes the more useful position: if access to information no longer justifies the building, then the building has to justify itself through the social and spatial experiences it makes possible. Moving from a collection-oriented typology to a people-oriented one, and designing for multiple personalities, age groups and patterns of use, gives the proposal a clear and defensible thesis.

The open question is how far the 2 by 2 metre module can be pushed before the recombinable prototype hardens into a fixed form; the renders show one configuration, and the adaptive claim would be stronger with a few alternatives. Still, the gaps, terraces and scaffolds point to a library that feels porous rather than institutional. That is a worthwhile direction for a typology that has to earn its public presence again.

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About the Designers

Designers: Yifan Su, Yumeko

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Project credits: Cyber Library by Yifan Su, Yumeko BookMark 2020 (uni.xyz).