China: Dream Library

Ask any bookworm for a wish they want granted, and chances are they’ll request for a huge library with floor-to-ceiling shelves of books and the perfect reading nook. The Tianjin Binhai Library in Tianjin, China—the result of a collaboration between architecture company MVRDV and the Tianjin Urban Planning and Design Institute (TUPDI)—brings this wish to life with its huge, white, spherical atrium. It is embellished with lines of bookshelves running all the way up to the ceiling. While the pictures suggest a full library, in reality, there are few actual books on the shelves. The illusion is courtesy of pictures of book spines pasted on the walls. The library, which opened in October, reportedly doesn’t have permission to place all of its books in the atrium. Most of them, in fact, lie in other rooms with traditional bookshelves, which may not be as instagrammable. But that won’t stop our social media feeds from being flooded by pictures of this library.