Portuguese National Library

For more than 50 years, this public building, a landmark in the production of knowledge, has been a place for collecting, protecting, and making available Portugal’s bibliographic heritage. The functionality and logic of its spatial organisation – based on the movements of the reader, the book, and the staff as closed circuits – remain current. Daciano da Costa designed the furniture, lighting, and materials for the main interior spaces. Among the various artistic interventions, Guilherme Camarinha designed the tapestry in the General Reading Room and Leopoldo de Almeida made the bas-reliefs on the main façade.