State Library Victoria Vision 2020 Architectus and Schmidt Hammer Lassen

The State Library of Victoria (SLV), fronting Melbourne’s Swanston Street, covers an entire city block. Founded in 1854 and opened in 1856, it has a fascinating and complex history, sharing its site, at times, with the institutions now called Museum Victoria and the National Gallery of Victoria. The precinct felt like another world prior to the most recent renovation, which began in 1985. Inside the Domed Reading Room (opened in 1913¹ ), sparrows and starlings flew around the ceiling. The room’s breathtaking internal streetscape included ghost facades sculpted inside its octagonal drum. A remarkable suite of Edwardian Baroque furniture was lit by rows of feeble bulbs, with students and homeless people alike hunched over desks in constant twilight. To borrow an item, you lined up in the old first-floor catalogue room, full of wooden chests of handwritten cards. Dust-coated men hastened up and down a spiral stair into Piranesian caverns in the stacks, fetching items from cabinets, tables and tallboys.

Since finances had been frozen in the 1920s and ’30s, the library