The Flexible Library: A Community-Run Library in Girona Where Seeing Others Learn Becomes the Programme

If any piece of information can reach a phone in seconds, why should anyone walk to a library? The Flexible Library answers by changing what the building is for. Storing books becomes secondary. The library becomes a place where people watch one another learn. A visitor who comes in to read may pass a workshop, a discussion or a film project. That glimpse of something unfamiliar is what the architecture is designed to produce.

Designed by Andra Ratcliffe and Carlyn Schaeffler, the project was a Shortlisted entry in BookMark 2020. The designers prototyped it in Girona, Spain, but they meant it to travel. It is conceived as a community-run library, a framework whose programmes, resources and accessory spaces can change as local needs change, and whose principles could be adapted by communities elsewhere.

Stacked Plans That Put Activities in View

The presentation board sets out the argument against the traditional library, with its quiet reading rooms, fixed shelving and separated programmes. Instead of hiding functions behind closed rooms, the stacked floor plans arrange activities so that visitors see them as they move through the building. The designers call this the relationship between "doing" and "seeing." Books, resources, activities and people are kept in visual contact throughout.

The courtyard vignette of figures playing football is telling. It suggests the library's public life spills outdoors and includes activity that has nothing to do with silent reading. The material swatches beside it show that the designers treated material expression as part of the concept. Read together, these drawings argue that a library's job is to provoke curiosity as much as to deliver knowledge people already came looking for.

A Bookcase Wall Thick Enough to Inhabit

The exploded axonometric shows the project's central idea most clearly. The designers contrast the physical weight of books with the apparent weightlessness of digital information, and they turn that contrast into the building's structure. The bookcase is not movable furniture. It becomes a solid central volume with a mezzanine and a stair built into it. Around it, the lighter elements sit in more open peripheral space: a glass room and tiered seating alcoves.

The move is clever because it refuses to treat print and digital as competing systems. The heavy collection anchors the building and gives it identity. The glazed room and flexible alcoves hold the changing, collaborative ways people now learn. The figures drawn for scale climb, sit and gather inside the shelving wall, which makes the collection something people occupy rather than simply consult.

Openings That Turn Reading Into a Shared Act

The section shows the double-height space in which this all happens. A diagonal stair with a glazed balustrade rises beside the grid of the bookcase wall. Arched openings cut through the central mass and link levels and activities that would otherwise be sealed off from each other. Seated readers on one level can see people moving, gathering or working on another.

This is where the design turns information into something both spatial and social. The glazed balustrade keeps the stair open to view, so people climbing it are on display, and the arches frame other activities like small stages. The section supports the project's central claim: moving through a library can itself be a way of learning, simply because so much of what happens inside is visible.

Why This Project Matters

Many proposals for the future library either celebrate digital tools or retreat into nostalgia for print. Ratcliffe and Schaeffler avoid both. They make the book collection the building's structural and spatial core, then cut into it so that the activity around it stays visible. The library keeps its weight and gains a public role it struggles to hold onto in a digital age.

The community-run model raises the stakes. Because the designers deliberately leave programmes open, the architecture has to carry the identity on its own. The inhabitable bookcase wall, the glazed stair and the arched openings do that work. The building will still read as a library whatever the community decides to hold inside it, which is why the idea could transfer beyond Girona.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Andra Ratcliffe, Carlyn Schaeffler

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: The Flexible Library by Andra Ratcliffe, Carlyn Schaeffler BookMark 2020 (uni.xyz).