A Space for the Future - Library Buildings in the 21st Century
Helsinki, Finland, June 2 - 3, 2002

by
Paolo Messina
Turin City Library System

I was very glad when Maija Berndtson asked me to prepare a speech for this Conference, because she gave me the opportunity to share with other people the exciting experience we are currently living in Turin.

I suppose that many of you already know about Turin for the FIAT car industry or for the Juventus soccer team. Now, everyone knows that Turin will host the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. But Turin is not only cars and sport: so, please, let me better introduce my town to you, in order to place the new Central Library building project in its frame.

Turin is the chief town of Piemonte, the larger north-western region of Italy. Just to give you some figures, it has 899.806 inhabitants, notably 431.540 males and 468.266 females. Also in Turin average age and life expectation are increasing: there are 147 people over a hundred years old.

Young people from 0 to 19 form about 15% of population. There are:
- 66.694 babies and children (0-9 years old)
- 32.174 children and teenagers (10-14 years old)
- 34.011 adolescents (15-19 years old).

Moreover, about 40.000 foreign people coming from non-EU countries are living in Turin with residence permit.

In the last two centuries Turin was one of the chief protagonists of the history of Italy and in various occasions it faced the challenges posed by change. Just to give you a short overview, in the first half of the 19th century Turin leaded the rest of the country towards the unification of the nation and it was the first capital city of the Italian Kingdom.

In the second half of the same century, after the transfer of the government first to Florence and then to Rome, Turin had to face a deep economic and social crisis and made the choice to redraw its future staking on the manufacturing sector and, for this reason, invested also in university education and in scientific research, therefore attracting numerous positivist academics from all Europe.

As a result of this traditional attention to science and technology, the Turin Polytechnic is still today one of the leading European universities for engineering studies.

At the beginnings of the 20th century the attention paid to the new developments in science and technology made of Turin the gate through which modernity entered Italy. Turin was the cradle of the first film studios, the first large telephone company, the national radio and television broadcasting company, the fashion industry in its first large-scale development, the car industry.

During the 20th century the development of the car industry was so strong and intense that it marked out and influenced the growth and the evolution of the entire city.

Today, while we are witnessing a worldwide crisis in the car industry, Turin is changing once more.

For what concerns the industrial field:
- we are going out from the FIAT monoculture
- thanks to a skilled manpower, industry is now oriented towards new advanced mechanical and technological productions (for instance, the Alenia "Leonardo" module for the International Space Station, that is going to be launched on board of the Shuttle within few days)
- from Turin the creative ideas of many protagonists of industrial design (like, for instance, Pininfarina and Giugiaro) go to producers all over the world
- in the ICT field, Turin houses the most prestigious research centre of Italy and recently the Motorola company chose to establish in Turin its own research centre, also for the presence of the Polytechnic
- through the Film Commission and the Virtual Multimedia Park, Turin has been relaunched as the ideal location for film shooting and for editing and producing films with the newest digital technologies
- Turin is wagering on tourism as well, thanks to its historic centre, full of baroque buildings and monuments, the proximity to the Alps, the presence of several museums: let me mention at least the Egyptian Museum, the second in the world after the Cairo Museum, the National Museum of Cinema (recently reopened in the Mole Antonelliana, the monument which is the symbol of Turin) and some relevant collections of contemporary art.

Under the point of view of the urbanistic transformation:
- large disused manufacturing areas in the heart of the city are now in the process of being transformed and devoted to new functions
- the public transport is changing radically: the railway line crossing the city from north to south is going to be completely lowered and roofed over; the works for the construction of the first underground line started last year and will end before the Winter Olympic Games in 2006.

In this frame we can take into consideration the construction of the new headquarters for the Central City Library.

It offers the opportunity to add an extra element of quality to this major transformation process already under way, with the inclusion of a public building capable of symbolising in architectural and functional terms, right in a central area, the commitment and the steps taken by the city to create its own future in the technological age of information and communication.

The new Cultural Centre will be a major architectural complex, also in terms of town planning. On a gross surface of about 40.000 square metres (about 430.000 square feet) in a vast disused industrial area, it will develop on several levels along a new avenue crossing the whole city (named the Spina Centrale, the Central Spine), in a strategic spot next to the underground and the national and local railway stations, as a Central Library has to be located.

The Centre will house the new Central Library, a large theatre (1200 seats, with a very flexible configuration of both the stage and the seats for the public), the headquarters of the foreign cultural institutes, a restaurant and several other commercial services, an open-air theatre on the roof of the indoor auditorium, a belvedere and a large panoramic terrace.

The City Council attached great relevance to the new Cultural Centre and expressed this importance through the procedures adopted to choose the most suitable project.

In the year 2000, a total of 175 architectural studios (45 of which were from abroad) took part in an international open competition. In designing the new complex, the competitors had to follow the prescriptions and requirements of a detailed Architectural Programme - formulated with the assistance of a consultant, architect Gianfranco Franchini - in which the essential features of the new library were strongly highlighted: its recognizability, its familiarity, the immediate perception of its being a place open to everyone, and a call for a prestigious architecture but with no ostentation.

In March 2001, the Jury - formed by architects and engineers but, above all, also by librarians (Wim M. Renes, former director of The Hague City Library, and Maija Berndtson, director of the Helsinki City Library) - chose the project of architect Mario Bellini from Milan.

I am sure you may be interested in some technical details. The total net surface requested by the Programme for the library was about 19.000 square metres (approximately 205.000 square feet), divided into:
- 8.200 sq.m. (about 88.200 sq.ft.) for the reading areas, including 570 sq.m. (6.100 sq.ft.) for the manuscripts, incunabula and rare books section
- 3.650 sq.m. (39.300 sq.ft.) for stack rooms
- 4.360 sq.m. (47.000 sq.ft.) for general services and functions to be located on the ground floor (lending, reference, community information, current periodicals, children department, young adults section)
- 1.030 sq.m. (11.000 sq.ft.) for the conference room and the multipurpose room (with a total capacity of 450 seats)
- 2.520 sq.m. (27.100 sq.ft.) for offices and other rooms for the staff.

The total gross surface of the library is over 27.000 square metres (about 291.000 square feet), based on a growth forecast for the next fifty years and on a consumer segment that includes the whole metropolitan area of Turin (about 1.700.000 people). The daily number of visitors is forecast at 5.000; the building is planned to house at least one million documents.

As the winner of the competition, Mario Bellini has been appointed to draw the definitive and executive design of the new Cultural Centre.

The City Library System today includes the Central library, the music library "Andrea Della Corte", 14 branch libraries, 2 prison libraries (which are City libraries, managed by our staff), a lending point and the Library network centre.

The new Central Library has been designed to offer Turin all the opportunities of a modern public library. It will also provide all the services of a central library, those services that today cannot be offered to the people of Turin in the ways and with the frequency common in public libraries of the major European cities because of the physical limits of the building housing the City Library at present.

Our aim is that the new Central Library is immediately perceived as a library belonging to everyone and for everyone: a place to keep abreast of developments in the world today, to meet people and to communicate in. It was designed to be a culture and information centre with all the latest technological services, but also a place to meet and socialise in, easily accessed by users of all ages and from all walks of life, with agreeable and comfortable interior spaces in order to put even non-habitual visitors at their ease.

The new Central Library was thought by librarians and now is designed by the architect with a continuous dialectic work with librarians to promote the coming together of ideas and people, to offer opportunities for people to learn and to express themselves creatively, to become an essential point of reference for cultural development and the improvement of the quality of life in the metropolitan area. In other words, the ideal place where to meet at any time of the day.

It will be the Central Library of Turin, but also a point of reference for the users (and the libraries) of the whole metropolitan area.

What I said until now may appear banal to you, who have a well-established experience of the public library services all over the world. But, as noticed by Maija Berndtson in the foreword to the book collecting all the designs which took part in our International Competition:

"The typical Italian public library, at least the central library, seems to have a lot of valuable books and manuscripts in its collections. Closed stacks and large reading rooms are the dominant features of the library buildings and the library users are mainly students and researchers".

We could all agree with Maija when she says that this kind of library is more a research library than a public library.

The Architectural Programme I mentioned before was designed to give Turin a real public library: for this reason, Turin will probably be the first large city in Italy to have its central library in a building designed since the beginning for that purpose.

The Cultural Centre will be easily accessible and will have a strong architectural sign: the insertion of the new Central Library in it, together with all its other functions (theatre, foreign cultural institutes, restaurant, and so on) will help the library to be perceived as a genuine public library, and not as a structure devoted only to students and scholars. In this way, the library will not suffer from the sense of isolation and exclusiveness that are, more properly, typical of some conservation and research libraries.

I would like to stress on the advantages we hope to get by joining other functions with the Library in the same Cultural Centre.

The union in the same place of two main opportunities for communication and cultural enrichment, like reading and performing, will reinforce the attracting power of both the library and the theatre, whose opening hours and events will be able to be planned so as to keep the activities in the new Cultural Centre lively for most of the day.

Also the foreign cultural institutes will benefit of the coexistence with the Central Library. The foreign institutes will be more visible and use the library conference rooms and exhibition areas. They will also be able to deposit in the Central Library their collections: on the open shelves of the library their books - whose aim is to improve the knowledge of their own country, language and culture - will be available to a greater number of people than in their present headquarters. On the other side, the library will significantly increase its foreign language collections. We have already undersigned an agreement with the Goethe Institut of Turin to have their books in our new Central Library.

Another interesting point of the project is the direct connection of the new Cultural Centre with the wide public park that will be visible from most of the reading seats of the library, distributed at each floor along the large glass walls facing north.

Clearly, the library building will be totally wired: on each reading table and, more generally, in all the areas for public use, there will be data and power connections.

But I think there is something else to be said about the way to stay in the library. Similarly to what happens in other Italian and European cities, also in Turin the number of people coming from foreign countries and continents is increasing. They have very different cultures and ways of living: we are considering whether, and how, to offer them, also in the adult areas of the library, for instance various kinds of informal seating, not only the armchairs and the couches that sound more familiar to Western users.

A special attention has been paid to the motor impaired: access to the library and internal circulation will be the same used by non-disabled people and, for instance, we are considering to use in the open-access areas shelves 1,60 metres high (5,25 feet) so that persons on wheelchairs will be able to get the books also from the top shelf.

The final aim in designing new, architecturally attractive, user-oriented cultural spaces is to offer through the new Central Library endless opportunities for leisure-time pursuits, for lifelong education, for getting information and communicating with other people, and for playing a better, more active role in society, as public libraries did since the beginning of their history. I am sure we will need such a public service also in the future global society.

In the library the user has the highest freedom of choice, starting from that fundamental experience of freedom and pleasure that is strolling among the shelves.

We are at the dawn of a new century that appears to be the starting point of a new age in which the availability of information is emerging as the essential strategic resource, even more important than the control of raw materials. The opportunity to access information and the different kinds of documents (paper, audio-visual, telematic, etc.) in which it is contained, together with the real capacity to "browse" telematically without getting lost or drowning in the ocean of information now available, may prove to be an ever more serious discriminatory factor for large groups of the population, also in the cities belonging to the more developed countries.

Libraries are proving to be a strategic public service against this new type of exclusion, the exclusion from information and knowledge needed today - and increasingly in the future - to find a job and to be integrated in the society. We are aware that the opportunity to carry out telematic research in public libraries makes them an institution where the less expert (or disadvantaged) citizens, on one hand, with the assistance of library staff, can most readily find the help to "surf" the Net to find the information and documents they need. On the other hand they can gain the experience to improve their own skills by themselves (through books, magazines, IT courses, internet workstations) or by attending courses in the Library seminar rooms.

In calculating the space for developing the collections in the next fifty years, we took into account that, even if new tasks are appearing in the age of the electronic revolution and of the development of the internet, the more traditional functions and materials (first of all, printed books) provided by the public library continue to satisfy a real need.

Since the availability of electronic catalogues and on-line link-ups facilitates academic research work, there is actually a rise, not a fall, in the demand for consultation of all types of documents that can be found in libraries. The second point is that precisely now, in the age of the electronic revolution, more and more printed books are being published, the housing of which is leading to an increase throughout the world in the number of programmes to enlarge existing libraries or build new ones. It seems more likely that electronic books will supplement rather than replace their printed counterparts, in much the same way as television coexists alongside radio.

The architectural and functional programme which the competitors were required to follow included spaces also for those visiting and using the library in groups rather than as individuals, since the new Central Library, like all other public libraries, must offer services to various groups of people, such as the set of people who come together at random to listen to the author of a new novel, but we have to foresee also lifelong learners who will have to be able to use the seminar rooms located on the various floors, close to the open access shelves.

For instance, at present we have individual internet workstations in all our libraries but only three, very elementary equipped, IT seminar rooms in our branch libraries.

The new Central City Library will then take the form of a large multimedia structure. As I have already mentioned, it will be able to house around one million documents (including around 300.000 in open access areas) and will be totally wired up to be able to offer the public the instruments and resources of the new technologies. It will be equipped with seats for 1.500 people, with individual study cells and rooms for group activities. The new library will be a modern multimedia laboratory in which to browse websites, access databanks, consult digital documents. But we want it to be also a familiar place where to sit at tables or in comfortable armchairs to thumb through books, newspapers and magazines freely chosen from the shelves.

The speed at which both technology and information, cultural and social needs are changing makes it necessary to get the maximum internal flexibility, especially in the public areas, in order to be able to change later on the location of reading areas, open access shelves and stack rooms.

For the Central City Library the change in location means being able to adapt its service to the needs of the city, to respond effectively to the growth and diversification of the need for information, and for the on-going education of the entire population, in a communicative and social context increasingly characterised by its multimedia and inter-cultural nature, as well as by the coexistence, in the same city, of technologically advanced manufacturing concerns and large numbers of poorly educated citizens.

These are among the reasons why the project of the new Cultural Centre forms part of the "Torino Internazionale" strategic plan, set up and endorsed by the main economic, social and cultural players in the Turin metropolitan area to redesign the future of Turin and enable it to fulfil the role of major European city to the full. The new Central City Library is an indispensable infrastructure for a city with its sights set on Europe and the world.

At the same time the new Central Library can be a symbol of this vocation and a high-quality means through which to express it in the best possible way.