Shifter: A Warsaw Library Built on Temporal Layers of Past, Present, and Future

What if a library could physically embody the passage of time? Shifter answers that question by stacking three temporal layers into a single topographic landscape in Warsaw: the past buried below grade, the present at ground level, and the future rising overhead. The result is a building that reads less like a conventional archive and more like a geological section through the city's collective memory, where mounds host dialogue and digital transmission while hollows safeguard printed knowledge in vault-like conservation spaces.

Designed by İrem Malgas and Bengüsu Yeşiloğlu, Shifter received an Honorable Mention in the Libgen 2019 competition. The project takes Warsaw as its proving ground, a city whose layered history of destruction and reinvention makes it an ideal site for architecture that treats time as a primary material. Rather than proposing a neutral container for books, the designers build an argument: as printed media migrate to digital formats, the physical library must pivot from storage to conservation, treating every book as a manuscript worthy of a vault.

A Topography of Knowledge: Mounds, Hollows, and the Transmitter Spire

The dome-shaped mass at the heart of the scheme is immediately legible as a landform rather than a conventional façade. Cyclists and pedestrians circulate around its base, treating it as parkland, while a slender spire pierces the skyline from the tallest mound. That spire is more than a formal gesture. It houses the transmitter, a digital server that broadcasts archived information to Warsaw's citizens on demand. The library's programme distributes itself according to slope: low-gradient mounds host "with dialogue" zones designed to foster conversation, while steep slopes shelter "without dialogue" retreats for solitary study. Hollows carved between these forms become conservation vaults where printed volumes are displayed like manuscripts, visible to the public yet protected from degradation.

Under the Shell: A Civic Plaza That Blurs Interior and Landscape

Beneath the sweeping canopy roof, the boundary between library and city dissolves entirely. Circular planted beds punctuate a paved courtyard, producing a ground plane that feels simultaneously interior and exterior. Shaded green areas and transitional foyers occupy the spaces between mounds and hollows, creating a new kind of urban zone where visitors can drift from a reading alcove into an open-air path without crossing a threshold. The shell-like ceiling overhead provides shelter while maintaining generous visual porosity to the sky and surrounding trees.

The planting strategy is deliberate: greenery is not ornamental but structural, reinforcing the topographic logic of the scheme. Circular planters echo the geometry of the vaults below, and their placement guides pedestrian flow along intuitive routes. The effect is a public ground that belongs as much to the neighbourhood as it does to the library programme, ensuring that even citizens who never check out a book still engage with the space daily.

Glass, Dome, and Tower: Mediating Between Civic Scale and Urban Skyline

From street level, the glass-clad curved façade reveals the interior life of the library while the white dome and tapering tower assert its civic presence against the Warsaw skyline. The glass skin operates as a threshold between the protected conservation hollows inside and the dynamic city outside. Light enters generously, reinforcing the idea that knowledge here is not sequestered but displayed. The tower's taper draws the eye upward, physically manifesting the project's temporal logic: from the buried past at the base, through the transparent present, to the future that broadcasts from the spire.

Reading the Timeline: How Elevation Encodes Warsaw's Urban History

The elevation drawing makes the temporal thesis explicit. Flanked by silhouettes of Warsaw's existing skyline, the section reveals how past, present, and future are encoded vertically. Below grade, archival vaults preserve the city's accumulated print heritage. At grade, public life unfolds across the fluctuating ground plane. Above, the transmitter mound and spire project information outward, symbolising a future in which the library's reach extends far beyond its physical footprint. The urban timeline graphics layered into the drawing reinforce the designers' analytical method: they studied Warsaw across three distinct historical moments before arriving at a form that synthesises all three.

Why This Project Matters

Most library competitions produce buildings that are either aggressively futuristic or nostalgically bookish. Shifter refuses both extremes by framing the transition from print to digital not as a rupture but as a geological process, something that accumulates in layers rather than erasing what came before. The Latin epigraph chosen by the designers, "Omnia mutantur, nihil interit" (everything changes, but nothing is truly lost), is not decorative sentiment; it is the operating principle encoded in the section.

What makes the project convincing is its commitment to integration. The mound-and-hollow topography gives every programme element a spatial reason for existing at a particular height and slope, while the transmitter spire turns the building into active urban infrastructure rather than a passive monument. For a competition entry by two young designers, Shifter demonstrates a rare ability to hold conceptual ambition and spatial specificity in the same hand. It suggests that the future library will not simply house knowledge; it will broadcast, conserve, and physically perform the city's relationship with time.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: İrem Malgas, Bengüsu Yeşiloğlu

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: Shifter by İrem Malgas, Bengüsu Yeşiloğlu Libgen 2019 (uni.xyz).