MVRDV Designs Wuhan's Central Library

Wuhan sits at the confluence of the Han and Yangtze Rivers, a geographical situation that is celebrated in the sculptural form of the building as well as, per a statement from MVRDV, "its interior character, spatial qualities, and materials." Located on a prominent site next to an overpass in Wuhan's CBD, the library design is shaped by its context, with three dramatic picture windows facing different parts of the city: the skyline, the nearby park, and an adjacent plaza.

Behind the large picture windows — as in the rendering at top — is a self-described "canyon of books": stepped terraces of books that are meant to recall a natural canyon and further reiterate the design's confluence-of-rivers concept. Renderings of the interior space beneath the flowing roof give the impression of a street, where the "storefronts" of the "buildings" are filled with books.

This competition win for MVRDV comes seven years after the firm completed its first library in China, the Tianjin Binhai Library. Here's hoping the architects learned from that project, which gained a lot of attention on social media for its cascading wall of books but quickly drew criticism for the way those books were primarily images of books, not the real thing. It appears such a deception is not the case here, but we won't know for sure until the project takes the leap from rendering to reality.