The plan of Magdalen College is represented by a variety of architectural interventions made over a period of 500 years. The college resisted any contribution from the modern era, however, and even the “New Building” is a fine freestanding terrace of 1733. The atmosphere of traditionalism is typified by Demetri Porphyrios’ neoclassical Grove Auditorium and student rooms of 1999. The new college library was to be located just to the north of this group, thereby enclosing the Grove courtyard.
For reasons partly of book storage and partly for their supervision, libraries tend to conform to finite geometry, whether rectangular, circular, or a combination of the two – Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris and Gibbs’ Radcliffe Camera in Oxford come to mind as paradigms. However, as earlier libraries were often essentially introverted affairs, and given Magdalen’s splendid park setting, it was logical that the reading carrels should take advantage of views to the celebrated deer park – observations that provided the genesis of our proposal.