The Seashore Library: A Concrete Reading Room Alone on a Chinese Beach
Completed in 2015 by Vector Architects at Aranya on the Bohai coast, the small library of board-marked concrete became one of the most photographed buildings in China.
In the spring of 2015 the Beijing practice Vector Architects completed a small library on an empty beach at Nandaihe, on the Bohai coast about 300 kilometres east of the capital. It stood by itself on the sand, a grey concrete box facing the sea, with nothing near it. Within months a short film about the building had been viewed millions of times in China, and it had acquired a name: the loneliest library.
The building
The architect, Dong Gong, conceived the library as a weathered rock on the shore. The walls are of concrete cast in place against timber boards, which left the grain of the wood on the surface, a texture the architects compared to sand rippled by wind.
Inside there are three main spaces, each with a different relation to the sea. The reading room is a hall of stepped platforms, arranged like a theatre, so that every reader faces the water through a wall of glass. The glazed doors at beach level pivot open to let in air and the sound of waves, and a band of glass blocks above them diffuses the light. The ceiling curves overhead and is pierced with small round openings.
Beside it, a meditation room is narrow, dark and tall, with a concave ceiling and slits of light to east and west that mark sunrise and sunset. An activity room upstairs opens to a terrace. Timber floors and furniture warm the concrete. Gong has described the intention as slowing people down, so that they notice light, breeze and the sound of the ocean.
What it did
The library was commissioned by the developer of Aranya, then a struggling residential project on an unfashionable stretch of coast. The building changed its fortunes. Visitors came to see the library and stayed to look at apartments, and the developer went on to commission a white chapel on the same beach, also by Vector Architects, an art centre by Neri&Hu and, in 2018, the UCCA Dune museum by OPEN Architecture.
Aranya became a case study in how architecture and cultural programming can create a place, and a model that other Chinese developers have tried to repeat. Dong Gong’s drawings and models for the library are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Visiting
The library is no longer lonely. Buildings have risen behind it and visitors queue at weekends. Entry is by reservation, with priority for residents and guests of the community’s hotels, and reading, in silence, is the only permitted activity inside. A weekday in spring or autumn gives the best chance of seeing it as it was intended. Trains from Beijing reach Beidaihe in about two hours.