The Zalman Aranne Central Library

The story

The Zalman Aranne Central Library is the central library of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and it is named after the Minister of Education who was among those who pressed for the founding of the university. The library preceded the building: at the beginning of the 1960s the preparations began for the founding of the Institute for Higher Education in the Negev, and in 1965 a library was set up in its first building under the direction of Dr. Nurit Roitberg, with a collection of about one thousand five hundred books, mainly on matters of the south. In 1971 the collection already numbered about seventy-one thousand books, and in the second decade of the twenty-first century more than a million titles. The size of the library was among the things that influenced the decision to turn the institute into a university in 1969. At the end of the 1960s a competition was held for the design of the library building, and it was won by the office “Nadler, Nadler, Bixon, Gil Architects” — Michael and Shulamit Nadler, Shmuel Bixon and Moshe Gil — which had already designed in the city the Keren cinema building and the city hall. The cornerstone was laid in 1971, the building was dedicated in 1972, and it was the first building in the university campus. The design deals with climate no less than with books: the building is built of exposed concrete, and on the facades facing south and east, which are exposed to the sun for many hours, the concrete was shaped so as to break the rays of the sun and prevent heating. The central reading room is a large space divided into levels, in order to give privacy on the one hand and continuity on the other, and in the ceiling are dozens of windows that let in natural light and make artificial lighting unnecessary during the daytime. An urban legend claims that the facade evokes an owl: a pair of round windows as eyes, and the roof windows as feathers. The library has reading rooms by field and special collections, among them the David Tuviyahu Archive for the History of Settlement in the Negev, and the Isaiah Berlin room — books that were given to him as gifts and were donated here.

• Brutalism
• Education
• Beersheba