For the past week or so, a recently completed futuristic library has been making waves on social media. The Tianjin Binhai Library, designed by the Dutch architectural firm MVRDV, bears all the hallmarks of the famed practice?s style: it’s visually stunning, technologically intelligent, and completely unique. The library is part of a larger cultural institution in Tianjin, China, and was designed by MVRDV in conjunction with the Tianjin Urban Planning and Design Institute. The building was constructed to create a link between an adjacent park and the city?s new cultural sector.

Spread out over five floors, the library employs organic, curving forms and undulating strata all throughout its interiors. Externally, the building’s ribbed envelope recedes to reveal a set of corresponding interior tiers, which create an almost topographical entity out of the ceiling as they get closer to the top. Visitors can even sit out on a few of the lowermost levels.
The library has no walls as such ? just a contoured landscape of bookshelves that swells in, out, and around the space. This effect is truly remarkable and makes the visitor feel as if they are engulfed in the architecture, which from every angle resembles the rippling surfaces you’d expect to find inside a cave. The white bookshelves give the space a futuristic atmosphere, which is enhanced by the giant sphere at the center of the structure. This sphere has been given the ominous name “the eye? because...