Ludbreg City Library

The location once housed a bakery plant, management, and supporting economic buildings. Apart from the old mill building in the immediate vicinity and outside the scope of the intervention, the existing buildings are not of historical importance and have been completely left to degradation over time.

The city’s spatial planning documentation calls for educational facilities in the zone to act as a generator for reviving the urban space, while physical reactivation is planned by retaining the locations and dimensions of the existing volumes.

The city library project is visually balanced with the Newton STEM Classrooms buildings on the site. The existing volume of the building has been partially repeated in its dimensions, simplified, and abstracted into a grey archetypal volume. A chromatically much larger section emerges from it, housing the more complex library programmes in the interior. By carefully splitting the additional volume, the continuity of the parallel buildings along the plot is maintained, while simultaneously directing movement within the site in a logical manner and defining the entrance to the building. Movement on the plot is thus focused towards the new building as a significant landmark within the scope, while halting movement at the future square. Additionally, the volumes are positioned in a way that successfully segregates a more private outdoor space for the library, which will serve as an outdoor extension of the multipurpose hall.

The former operational vehicle zone is transformed into a space for pedestrian interaction with the central space of the square for joint outdoor activities, while the narrower part of the plot retains the potential for the development of smaller programmes. The wider area in the immediate vicinity is dominated by greenery, which should ideally be “drawn” into the plot in the future through the design of the square.

The elongated character of the building is also experienced from the inside. Entrance is gained into the very heart of the building, organised around a central penetration, allowing all floors to be experienced right from the ground floor. The northern central stretch of the building is simultaneously both operational and service-oriented, while the individual library departments are organised at the edges and meet in the central shared space of the information desk on the ground floor. The upper floor is spatially somewhat more fluid and airy, with the dominant volume of the attic visible from every perspective. At the same time, it is visually connected to the ground floor and the multipurpose hall and can be overlooked from the attic space. The unique space of the attic is dominated by the surface of a dynamic roof structure resulting from the design of the external volumes.

The building aims to retain the user within the interior. Communication with the outdoor space exists, but it does not constitute the primary backbone of the building’s organisation.