University Library in Weimar

The establishment of the Bauhaus University dates back to the mid-19th century (then as a grand ducal art school), but the name (State Bauhaus) and fame were given to the school only after World War I by Walter Gropius, who guided the school through the turbulent interwar period. The father of the Bauhaus eventually settled at Harvard University near Boston, having traveled through Dessau, Berlin, and London, but the spirit of the school remained in Weimar. After World War II, the University of Architecture and Civil Engineering opened, which only received its current name and university status in 1996 (when the Bauhaus was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site). The school, which is no longer focused solely on art, design, and architecture, currently hosts more than 4,000 students in 40 different fields. They are all served by a common university library located on the southern ring road in the former brewery district in the center of Weimar.
The building was originally intended to serve the city as a conference center. The winning design from 1991 was created by Munich architect Andreas Meck. Since the original intention was not fulfilled, the city turned to the university, which was urgently seeking new spaces. This resulted in a new building with a lecture hall for 400 listeners and a central library, where more than half a million volumes from smaller libraries scattered throughout the city were collected.
The new structure is divided into two wings that open from the busy street into a quiet courtyard. The shape of the building adapts to the surrounding heterogeneous development while also making a large part of the city block accessible. Meck takes advantage of the four-meter height difference at both ends of the construction site, creating staircases and bridges in a three-story foyer that runs north-south through the entire building. Thus, one can easily orient oneself throughout the house right from the entrance. The western entrance courtyard is completed by a giant 7.5-meter-high wooden stool "Lehrstuhl – leerer Stuhl" by Hermann Bigelmayr (the twenty-ton oak structure may remind one of the work of Magdalena Jetelová, but here the author refers more to "the manifestation of a post-hermeneutic approach")
The heart of the entire building is the library, which occupies 3,800 m² of the total usable area of 4,300 m².
The reading rooms offer a total of 240 study places. While the outer shell and internal communications are made of dark gray exposed concrete, the interior of the library is clad in light oak wood, referring to the nearby burned library of Duchess Anna Amalie.