The Main Campus Library at the University of Birmingham’s Edgbaston Campus has made the final four in the 2019 SCONUL Awards.
The prestigious SCONUL Library Design Awards showcase and celebrate the very best in recent academic library design in the UK and Ireland.
The 2019 awards received fifteen high calibre submissions and the judging panel found the decision making and short listing process hard. After careful consideration the judges announced that the University of Birmingham’s new library had been shortlisted for the awards.
The winners will be unveiled at the Library Design Awards event on Tuesday 26th November 2019 at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. You can see details of all the finalists here.
The University of Birmingham Main Campus Library splits 17,000sq.m of floor space over six levels. A series of lightwells run throughout, utilising optimum daylight, whilst automatic blinds respond accordingly to provide solar shading. Half of the ground floor atrium is dedicated to open access facilities, with the remainder populated by IT facilities.
A variety of learning spaces cater to users’ differing needs. Video editing booths, wireless mobile charging facilities and media rooms sit alongside 62km of shelving filled with thousands of books from the university’s important collections. A below-ground reserve store houses over 1.5 million items, allowing users to access materials from a single location, with staff on hand to enable research.
You can see a short video on the building on our YouTube channel or on the project page.
