On April 18, 2026, the Westlake University Library officially opened its doors. As the core landmark building of the entire campus, the Library has now embarked on its intended mission.

The Library brings together the Main Library (floors 2–5), the History Exhibition Hall and Archives (ground floor), the AI Research Center (floors 6–7), and a tower. Located at the northwest end of the Science and Technology Island, the building anchors the campus's central precinct. It enters with the Academic Hall into a compositional dialogue—one square, one circular. Above, the 108-meter tower and the 80-meter Academic Exchange Center echo each other at the southeastern tip. Standing in visual counterpoint, they command sweeping views across the core campus from multiple vantage points.

A Learning Center That Defies Definition

The modern university library has moved beyond the traditional model of mere book storage and reading. What emerges instead is a hybrid space for diverse learning, intelligent services, and human-centric care. It demands high functional density, diverse yet comfortable settings, spatial flexibility, and smart, efficient access to collections. Today, despite or perhaps because of the rise of e-books and the internet, the library's value as a university landmark has shifted. It now endures as a place of intellectual memory and social gathering in academic life. Faculty and students come here not just for books, but for a quiet corner to read, to pause, to take in a view—or to connect in the cloud, to huddle in group discussions, to lose themselves in salons. The library has, in a sense, become a multifunctional social learning hub for the university—a transformation that raises the bar for spatial experience and comfort, both inside and out. Through reconfiguring and extending the library's core functions, the design redefines interior and exterior spaces alike. Indeterminate transitional and shared zones are granted greater plasticity, giving rise to a future-oriented social space and learning center that defies definition.

Unique Outdoor Roaming Paths

Externally, the design aspires to create a three-dimensional space for learning and interaction befitting a new model of the modern university, while engaging in a landscape dialogue with the campus's Central Garden and the water ring to its northwest. The building's form responds to three pedestrian flows on the ground: the Central Garden to the south, Bridges 14 and 15 of the residential quarter to the west, and Bridge 17 to the north. At ground level, a series of large staircases aligned with these three directions converge and channel visitors upward to the Library's main entrance on the eastern second-floor terrace. Here, every moment of arriving at or departing from the Library offers a view skyward to the signature tower and outward to the Academic Hall and the Central Garden beyond. On the southern second-floor terrace, stairs continue the ascent along the southeastern side, leading up to an outdoor platform on the sixth floor. In fair seasons, this exterior path allows faculty and students to walk directly between levels, creating an ever-changing landscape experience while increasing the likelihood of chance encounters across disciplines. Perhaps the spark of cross-disciplinary fusion will be born right here, at this very moment.

To emphasize the verticality of the signature tower while avoiding any sense of compression from the Library's main volume along the north-south axis, the building's form, in conjunction with the exterior stepped walkways, naturally develops into a terraced composition that recedes from southeast to northwest. This strategy maximizes the creation of multiple ground levels and a 270-degree optimal view toward the Central Garden to the southeast. The Library's staggered tripartite form "three books in motion" thus emerges organically.

A Romantic Indoor Atrium Space

A nearly 35-meter-tall skylit atrium is inserted into the heart of the building. Together with the staggered exterior forms and the walking terraces that loop around the atrium at each level, natural light is drawn deep into the interior, striving to create a sense of the outdoors, indoors. A monumental functional stairway aligned with the east entrance draws visitors up to the third floor, where a straight-run staircase continues around the atrium, rising through the volume of the "second book" and terminating at the elevator lobby on the fifth floor. There, the indoor pedestrian flow meets the vertical circulation. Meanwhile, daylight pours in from the roof, casting shifting, dappled shadows across the floor and columns—an invitation that draws students and faculty upward, step by step. The result is an interior-exterior pedestrian system in constant interplay, one that amplifies the Library's spatial vitality and fosters open, learning-rich encounters.

On the sixth and seventh floors, the AI Research Center forms its own distinct volume—the "third book" at the top. Here, the white grille texture of the exterior architecture extends indoors, generating a strong sense of interlocking, staggered volumes. This stands in deliberate contrast to the wood-grain texture of the atrium on floors two through five, endowing each zone with a clearly legible functional identity. For researchers in the center, a daily glance through the glass toward the lively atrium area below may spark a new idea. Perhaps, when fatigue sets in, the thought of descending to the Library's lobby for a coffee, or finding a seat by the reading room window to watch the sunset and simply pause, becomes the best way to recharge and invite inspiration.

The eight-story atrium is capped with a white grille screen at the seventh level, effectively concealing the glazed roof's steel structure and exposed mechanical systems. By day, it converts direct sunlight into diffused light, providing effective solar shading. By night, it works in tandem with an integrated concealed lighting system to illuminate the atrium. Here, the art and craft of architecture are perfectly fused, resulting in an interior atrium that is both pure and distinctive.

A Futuristic Tower

Kevin Lynch's five core elements from The Image of the City have long influenced architects in their master planning of university campuses. A campus is, in essence, a small town. When these five elements are fully engaged during the planning and design phase, the result can be an ideal, distinctive, and human-scaled university campus. The Westlake University Library has already embodied four of the five elements—paths, nodes, districts, and edges—whether through the surrounding Central Garden, waterways, and bridges, or through its own architectural form. The one element still missing: landmarks. The 108-meter signature tower, conceived as a structural landmark rather than a conventional building, took shape through multiple rounds of conceptual comparison. The final design adopts a staggered form reminiscent of a space shuttle, with three indoor-outdoor observation platforms at 30, 54, and 84 meters.

To heighten the tower's futuristic and technological character, the facade is clad in titanium. Titanium is not only highly self-cleaning but also possesses a natural character that never fades with time or sunlight, making it one of the most stable of all metals. Moreover, it reveals a unique luster and texture under changing weather conditions.

With its completion, the Westlake University Library not only becomes a new landmark on campus but also joins the Academic Ring and the Academic Hall to form a distinctive architectural cluster at the heart of the university, embodying an entirely new campus typology for a new kind of research university in China.