Opendoor Library: A Modular Reading Landscape for Girona Built From Nature, Memory and Salvaged Doors

Most libraries wait. They sit behind a facade, hold their books inside, and rely on readers to find their way to the front desk. Opendoor Library reverses that arrangement. Its premise is simple: if a city wants more people to read, the library has to do the inviting. The building should reach out to people instead of standing still and hoping they arrive.

Designed by Shaghik Melikian and recognised as an Editor's Choice entry in BookMark 2020, the proposal imagines an open, modular, landscape-based library for Girona. It avoids a single monumental enclosure. Books, plants, furniture, meeting points, historical fragments and adaptable modules are spread across an accessible outdoor ground. The project's introductory diagrams state the shift clearly. They do not show one person urging another to visit a library; they show the library itself extending the invitation. In that framing, architecture takes part in public life instead of serving as a container for it.

Belonging Comes Before Building Type

The project does not begin with a typology. It begins with a question: what makes people feel a place belongs to them? Melikian proposes three answers. The first is nature, the earliest home humans shared with other living things. The second is history, the stories, cultures, art and architecture through which a society recognises itself. The third is information, the knowledge people record, exchange and preserve. Each of these becomes a physical component of the scheme rather than a reference on a concept board.

The courtyard rendering shows what that translation produces. Pink pointed-arch partitions divide the tiled ground into loose rooms, and round stools and green chairs sit beneath palm fronds with no fixed orientation. Nothing about the scene announces an institution. It reads more like a familiar patio than a civic building, which is exactly the point: the library should feel known before it feels official.

Shade, Sun and Water Define the Reading Rooms

A conventional library controls its environment with walls and mechanical systems. Opendoor lets the landscape do that work. In this view, a narrow water channel cuts through the patterned tile, shelves line the edges, and bistro tables sit under palms in soft daylight. Readers who want shade can settle beneath the trees, and those who want sun can move into the open. Breezes, changing light and movement through the site become part of the experience of reading.

This is the scheme's strongest spatial idea. A shaded tree works as a reading room, a planted edge works as a threshold, a path does the job of a corridor, and a cluster of furniture becomes a temporary seminar space. The definition of a library expands without giving up the basics: focus, discovery and the chance to meet other people.

Shelves That Line the Route

Here a tiled passage runs between weathered painted doors on one side and a book-lined shelf on the other, with palm fronds catching the light overhead. The books are not stored in a room you have to enter on purpose. They sit along the route you would walk anyway, so passing through becomes browsing. Because the shelves, seating and meeting areas are modular, the arrangement can grow or shift over time instead of being fixed at opening day. That makes the project behave less like a finished institution and more like a growing civic landscape.

Salvaged Doors as Threshold and Memory

The doors give the project its name and its most memorable image. Salvaged carved wooden doors are set into pale arched walls above mosaic paving, and reclaimed panels stand framed by tall walls on a tiled plaza edged with dense foliage. Each door carries traces of the buildings it once belonged to. Placed in the library, they stand for the history strand of the concept, presenting architectural memory as something you can touch rather than read about on a placard.

The doors also carry a quieter spatial irony. A door normally separates inside from outside, but here it marks a threshold in a place that is open by design. These are doors that never need to be opened in order to let you in. Alongside the project's references to clay, one of humanity's longest-used materials for recording information and making objects, the doors root the library in material culture that people already recognise.

Why This Project Matters

Opendoor Library treats public engagement as a spatial problem instead of a programming problem. Many library proposals add cafes or event spaces in the hope of drawing people through the entrance. Melikian removes the entrance as a barrier altogether. She spreads the collection across a landscape of trees, water, tile and reclaimed fragments, so reading becomes something people come across in the course of the day, not something they have to plan.

The proposal does leave practical questions open, including weather, how the books are protected and how the place is maintained. Its value is in reframing the brief. By grounding the design in nature, history and information, the three things people already feel are theirs, it argues that care for a public building follows from a sense of ownership. A library that feels like it belongs to its readers is one they are more likely to return to, and to look after.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Shaghik Melikian

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Project credits: “Opendoor” Library by Shaghik Melikian BookMark 2020 (uni.xyz).