Bibliotheca Alexandrina: A Look at Egypt’s Modern Library

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Latin for “Library of Alexandria”), which opened in 2002, is a modern library and cultural center in Egypt meant to pay homage to the ancient Library of Alexandria that was lost to time. The building is just a little over a hundred feet away from the Mediterranean Sea in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in the ancient world, but it is now the third-largest city in Egypt today after Cairo and Giza. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is part of a wider, waterfront thoroughfare near the western edge of the Nile Delta, known in the Arab world as the Corniche.

The Egyptian government, founding director Ismail Serageldin, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), and Alexandria University formed a joint venture to create the new Alexandria Library.

The facility, which is 80,000 square meters, features enough shelves to hold eight million volumes of books, a main reading room, a specialized rare books section apart from the main library, art galleries, a conference center, a planetarium, and a host of other research centers and permanent exhibitions—including a science museum, an antiquities museum, and a museum paying tribute to the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. The library’s Aswan granite walls feature engraved letters from every known language and alphabet.

Like the great library of old, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina isn’t just a repository for the history of science, letters, and all other aspects of human knowledge, but an architectural marvel as well. The 11-story circular building features a contemporary design. It rises out of the ground like a tilted block of cheese, with north-facing skylights on its roof.

The Alexandrian library is an impressive landmark in its own right. Here are four facts about the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a fixture of Egyptian and Arabic culture:

1. 1. A Norwegian firm designed the library. Despite its location in Egypt, the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta designed the library. The company also designed other notable buildings worldwide, including in Berlin, Toronto, New York City, and Oslo.
2. 2. The library contains a notable francophone collection. Alongside the many books celebrating the heritage and history of the Islamic and Arabic world found here, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina also possesses the sixth-largest collection of French-language books in the world.
3. 3. Culturama Hall features state-of-the-art technology. The Culturama Hall is a section of the library with a 180-degree computer screen on its walls. This display hosts a variety of educational and informational shows for library visitors.
4. 4. The library boasts vast data and internet resources. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has a partnership with Internet Archive to externally store petabytes of data from the digital age, stretching back to 1996. In addition, the International School of Information Science—also located in Alexandria—has created online databases and search engines to comb through the library’s many resources.

Get the MasterClass Annual Membership for exclusive access to video lessons taught by the world’s best, including Frank Gehry, Will Wright, Annie Leibovitz, Kelly Wearstler, Ron Finley, and more.