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Mexico's mega-library sinks in the rain

It seems a bit of rain was enough to jeopardize Mexico's most modern library, opened in great pomp last year at a cost of some 120 million dollars. The Jose Vasconcelos "mega-library" in Mexico City was designed by Mexican architect Alberto Kalach, but it was only open for 10 months and will now most likely remain closed until late January 2008.

Workers have been mending the faults left by a hurried inauguration. Some patches are apparent in the ceilings, there are piled-up boxes and chairs, half-empty shelves and thousands of books - a total of 550,000 volumes - are being sorted.

"It was a rushed opening, let's admit it," Carmen Quintanilla, technical secretary of the National Council for Culture and Arts (Conaculta), told dpa. "It would have been much better to wait until it was complete."

Political times set the pace. Former Mexican president Vicente Fox, who departed in 2006, had conceived the library as the greatest cultural project of his administration. If he had waited until it was ready, the library would have been opened by his successor.

Seen from the ground floor, the 11,000-square-metre library looks like a garden with hanging workers. Seven floors of shelves, reaching almost up to the ceiling, stare down at the visitor from the air. Users can get up to each floor by metal stairs - a walk that is unsuitable for people suffering from vertigo.

When UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura visited the site two months before the opening, he described it as beautiful and impressive. The problems were not yet apparent.

The central corridor is dominated by the skeleton of a whale that was stranded in the Vizcaino Bay on the coast of Mexico's Baja California peninsula. The bones were decorated in graphite by the Mexican sculptor Gabriel Orozco, in a work known as Matrix Movil (Mobile Matrix).

When it was opened on May 16, 2006, the shelves were full of books. There was applause, only six days before the deadline for the outgoing president to inaugurate works before the country goes to the polls. The presidential election was held on July 2, 2006.

Soon afterwards, however, the building started to leak. "Leaks ... problems with humidity and ventilation in the auditorium, serious problems. We had to carry out an evaluation of the electric and hydraulic installation and study the fire hazard issue," Quintanilla said.

The supervision of the work by the Managing Committee of the Federal Program for the Construction of Schools showed that 10 of the 45 subcontracted companies had not done their job.

"We had to start suing them to do the work again at no cost for the state, or to make them pay for the work that they had not done," Quintanilla noted. Kalach in turn was furious.

"If they already paid them, it is because they agreed with the work. And now, demanding that they fix them is like asking for the moon," he said. In a report, the architect denounced "the lack of coordination of an unnecessarily hurried work."

The Public Education Department and Conaculta had to release some 5.6 million dollars for things that were not included in the original project, like the installation of safety railings.

One of the great proponents of the mega-library was Mexican author Carlos Fuentes, who personally donated 139 volumes of 38 of his works. Other donations were received from Argentina, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Ireland, Peru, Spain, Turkey and Uruguay, among other countries.

The idea is that the building functions as an "electronic brain" for the national network of 7,200 libraries, but it is far from that goal.

The mega-library, built on the grounds of an old railway station in northern Mexico City, is a sort of alternate, much more modern seat of the Jose Vasconcelos Mexican Library, which has been active since 1946 in a building from 1807 in the centre of the capital.

Once it is really opened - with 800 computers, a Braille room, a media library and a children's zone, among other things - it will hopefully receive an estimated 4-5 million visitors a year. While it was open, from June 2006 to March 2007), 311,000 people used the premises, mostly to access the Internet for free.

Beyond the construction problems, faults were also detected in the classification of books, and authorities are worried about the 26,000-square-metre botanical garden that surrounds the building.

The general manager for Mexico's libraries, Federico Hernandez Pacheco, said the garden could pose problems for the books, such as humidity, and it needs to be looked after.

"The garden still stands. That is how the project of architect Kalach won. But that turned out to be a problem: maintaining a botanical garden is not the vocation of the National Council for Culture and Arts," Quintanilla said.
 

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