The Library at the Želiv Monastery

The Premonstratensian monastery in Želiv has gone through a series of transformations and upheavals since its foundation in the 12th century. In the 1950s, it served as a so-called internment concentration camp, where the communist regime detained priests and monastic clergy. Adjacent to the monastery church is a one-story convent with a square floor plan, where there is a large room with frescoes on the first floor – the former library. Unfortunately, the original wooden shelves have not survived to this day. Our task was to design a new library to house a great deal of valuable books. Our concept works with the load of books and symbolically divides the form of the library into a support and a burden. It is a composite system of concrete supports and sheet metal shelves, which gives the assembly an overall order resulting from structural necessity and gravity. In the interest of maximal presentation of the entire book fund, a choice was made to sort them according to size in order to make maximum use of the entire space. The shelves are ordered from the largest in the bottom row to the smallest in the top row. The concrete supports also respond with their height to the size of the books, and the views are composed in the proportions of the golden sectional view. The supports were cast directly on site, using gravel and pebbles from the River Želivka. Our goal was to imprint the place into the architecture itself. Our goal was to imprint the place into the architecture itself. The entire system was assembled as a kit within a few days, without the need for anchoring to existing historical structures. A table is situated in the centre of the room – an eight-meter sheet metal plate on which selected open books are presented under thirteen lids. Our intention was to symbolically create the impression of a kind of feast at the table, as the monastery refectory is located directly under the library.