On Saturday morning the doors of Hallen Library opened to a queue that reached all the way down to the harbour. By Sunday evening, more than 6 000 people had walked down its four timber terraces, borrowed 2 300 books and filled every seat in the reading hall.

Four years in the making

The competition was won in 2021 with a set of hand sketches and a single card model. Two years of design followed, with workshops for staff, readers and neighbours, and then eighteen months on site. Through all of it, the core idea never changed: the building would follow the slope instead of fighting it.

A building that steps down the hill

The site falls eleven metres from the old town to the water. Rather than level it, the library steps down with it in four terraces. Each one is a little lower and a little quieter than the last, so the busy children’s floor sits at the top and the silent study room looks straight out over the harbour.

The concrete plinth

Below the terraces, a board-marked concrete plinth holds the archive, the plant rooms and the café. Half of the cement was replaced with GGBS, cutting the embodied carbon of the concrete by around 45 percent. The timber grain of the formwork is still visible on every wall.

The oak-lined reading hall

Above the plinth sits one continuous hall lined in 11 400 oak slats. Each slat is fixed with hidden clips, so any one of them can be replaced in minutes. A single 40-metre clerestory runs along the ridge and fills the hall with even northern light all day.

Designed with the librarians

The staff shaped the plan from the first workshop. The returns desk moved three times; the children’s corner moved twice. The librarians asked for places to read alone and places to read together, and the terraces gave us both: open steps for groups, alcoves for quiet.

The first weekend in numbers

6 000 visitors, 2 300 loans, 340 seats in use at peak and a café that ran out of cinnamon buns by eleven o’clock on Saturday. The city expects visits to double compared with the old library within the first year.

Thank you

A building like this is made by hundreds of people. Our thanks to the City of Aarhus, to Søe & Kirk Engineers, Nord MEP, Field Office, Lumen Atelier and Brink Byg, and to every carpenter who fixed an oak slat.

What comes next

The archive moves into the plinth over the summer, and the café terrace opens in August. In the autumn we will publish a full set of drawings and a short film about the build here in the journal.