A glass pyramid filled with nothing but books

Rotterdam has a new public library called Book Mountain, and it's exactly what the name suggests. A pyramid-shaped glass shell several floors designed to look like a mountain made of books. This is exactly the kind of place where the angels in Wings of Desire would have hung out.

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DiY Public Library Is a Low-Tech Beauty

selbibvillan12_rt8.jpg A new library in Casanera, Colombia shows us what humankind might have built with sticks and stones if they'd never discovered bricks, steel, and electricity. The Villanueva Public Library was built on a modest budget, designed by a bunch of university students in Bogota. And instead of importing fancy, expensive…

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Spielberg Gets Locked Into Underground Vault

avcon_packard.jpg Two films that Steven Spielberg had a hand in, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Back to the Future, were both selected alongside 23 other films to be shelved forever in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. They'll get locked up inside a hermetically sealed vault, and preserved in mason jars with…

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Mutant Spore Library in Czech Republic May Never Get Built

futurelibrary.gif Earlier this year, architect Jan Kaplicky won a contest for this design of the planned Czech National Library. Though observers say he won fair and square, controversy over the purple, ten-story, octopus-shaped building continues to rage. President Vaclav Klaus has rejected the design, and so the Czech Republic may…

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