Bibliotheca Alexandrina

A vast tilted disc of granite and glass on the Alexandria waterfront, leaning towards the sea like a rising sun. It opened in 2002 as a deliberate revival of the ancient Library of Alexandria, and whatever you make of that ambition, the building is genuinely worth the visit.

The reading room

The main hall is the reason to come: eleven cascading levels stepping down under a slanted roof of glass louvres, seating around two thousand readers, with no walls between the tiers. It is one of the most impressive interior spaces built anywhere in the last half-century, and you can walk in and look at it.

Also inside

• The Antiquities Museum, built around finds made while digging the foundations
• The Manuscript Museum, with rare books and a facsimile programme
• A planetarium in a separate sphere outside
• Permanent exhibitions on Alexandria's history and on Egyptian printing

The outer wall

The curved granite wall facing the corniche is carved with characters from around 120 different writing systems — alphabets, syllabaries and scripts from every era, cut at random across the surface. Walk along it slowly; you will recognise more than you expect.

The ancient library was founded under the early Ptolemies, attached to the Museum, and at its height it was the most ambitious attempt at collecting knowledge the world had seen — ships entering the harbour were reportedly searched for books, which were copied and the copies returned to the owners.

It did not burn down in a single night. That story is much tidier than the truth: the collection declined over centuries through fire during Caesar's campaign, imperial funding cuts, the expulsion of scholars, civil unrest, and the destruction of the daughter library at the Serapeum in 391 CE. It ended by attrition.

Rebuilding the idea

The proposal to revive it began at Alexandria University in the 1970s and became an international project under UNESCO. An architectural competition in 1989 drew more than 500 entries and was won by Snøhetta, then an unknown young practice in Norway — the commission made them.

Construction ran through the 1990s and the library opened in 2002. Its shelf capacity is around eight million volumes; the collection is far smaller than that, which is a common criticism, though it has grown steadily and it holds significant digital and archival collections.

What it actually does

The more interesting answer to the criticism is what the institution has become in practice: a research centre, a conference venue, a digital archive — it holds a mirror of the Internet Archive — and, unusually for Egypt, a genuinely public cultural space. During the 2011 uprising, people from the surrounding neighbourhoods formed a human chain around it to keep it from being damaged.