The Kansai-Kan National Diet Library

The library building is aimed to preserve and provide access to an enormous volume of library materials that represent the common asset of the Japanese people. Additionally, it will house research, development, training and exchanges activities related to library services.

It consists of a series of forms arising from impulses connected with library activities and representing the link between human activities & pre-existing traces in the geographical & cultural landscape.

The form enhances the experience of moving, with space compression and contraction, the play of light and shadow and the elemental experience of being folded in the earth. Texture and materials increase the sensations of transition through veils. The building aims to create the image of architecture as social landscape, made up of interlocking platforms & layers of thin walls traversed by ramps & stairs.