National Library of Belarus Archives

The idea of the library can feel antiquated in an age of e-readers and infinite scroll. For those of us no longer in school, the reasons to actually visit one have thinned out over the years. And yet a great library has always been about more than its shelves — the space itself becomes something like a temple: a place of quiet exploration, of calm, of learning, built with an ambition that has nothing to do with square footage of storage.

There is a wealth of extraordinary libraries scattered across the world. Here are five that are visually stunning — plus one glorious bonus we couldn’t leave out.

A collage of five extraordinary libraries around the world, from Stuttgart's minimalist white cube to Amsterdam's gilded Rijksmuseum reading room. — Five libraries worth traveling for, at a glance.

1. Stuttgart City Library — Germany

Stuttgart City Library has anchored Mailänder Platz for a decade and a half now — it opened in November 2011, the result of a three-year build and an 80-million-euro (roughly $108 million) commission awarded to Korean architect Eun Young Yi. Yi’s design is a nine-story-above-ground, two-story-below-ground monolithic cube, nearly all white, inside and out. At its center, the floors ring an open atrium connected by dramatic open staircases, with the collection itself lining the outer walls of every level.

As a quiet nod to the building’s purpose as a storehouse of words, the word “library” is spelled out in four languages across its exterior walls: German (the local tongue) faces north, English (the lingua franca) faces west, Arabic (the language of ancient scholarship, and of Stuttgart’s sister city Cairo) faces south, and Korean — Yi’s own language — faces east.

Exterior of Stuttgart City Library's stark white monolithic cube rising above Mailänder Platz in Germany, photographed from street level looking up.

Interior of Stuttgart City Library's book-lined atrium, with open staircases connecting the stacked white floors.

2. The National Library of France — Paris

The National Library of France traces its lineage back to the royal library Charles V founded at the Louvre in 1368, expanded under Louis XIV and opened to the public in 1692. Its historic Richelieu site — shown below — pairs a grand nineteenth-century building with a modern wing added in the late 1980s, together serving a readership of more than two million. The building is a remarkable surviving example of the École des Beaux-Arts school of architecture, and its showpiece is the Salle Ovale: a domed, skylit reading room ringed with tiered wooden shelving that has quietly served scholars for well over a century.

The domed, skylit Salle Ovale reading room at the Bibliothèque nationale de France's historic Richelieu site in Paris, ringed with tiered wooden bookshelves.

Rows of reading tables inside the Bibliothèque nationale de France's Salle Ovale research room, lit by its glass-domed ceiling.

3. Library of Alexandria — Egypt

Alexandria is one of the oldest cities in the world, and its library carries that weight deliberately. Officially the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, this modern research and cultural center sits directly on the Mediterranean shoreline, conceived as a memorial to the Royal Library of Alexandria — the legendary institution lost in antiquity, whose alumni once included Euclid, Eratosthenes (the library’s third director, who calculated the earth’s circumference and proved it was a sphere centuries before Columbus ever set sail), Archimedes, the anatomist Herophilus, and Aristarchus, an early proponent of the idea that the earth orbits the sun. That original library existed for roughly seven centuries, from 290 BCE until its loss by 415 CE.

Completed in 2002, its modern successor is a bold, disc-shaped structure inspired by the rising sun, rising eleven stories — four of them below ground — a stone’s throw from where the ancient library likely once stood. Its tilted granite facade, carved with characters from the world’s alphabets, and its cavernous, terraced reading hall are exactly the kind of ambitious civic architecture we rounded up in 10 Amazing New Museums.

Exterior of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, its tilted granite disc facade carved with characters from the world's alphabets, facing the Mediterranean Sea.

Interior of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina's vast reading hall, its terraced floors lit by a grid of skylights beneath a sweeping tilted roof.

4. National Library of Belarus — Minsk

Minsk’s National Library of Belarus cannot be accused of playing it safe. Its main volume takes the shape of a rhombicuboctahedron — a many-sided polyhedron more at home in a geometry textbook than a skyline — designed by architects Mihail Vinogradov and Viktor Kramarenko and opened in June 2006. The building rises 22 floors, and its entire faceted exterior doubles as a programmable light display capable of a startling variety of patterns after dark.

It’s about as far from a traditional reading room as architecture gets — a sensibility that also runs through Zaha Hadid’s only private residence, another building that treats geometry as spectacle. Traditional, the Belarus library is not. But it isn’t easily forgotten, either, which hopefully means it will serve the people of Belarus for a very long time.

The rhombicuboctahedron form of the National Library of Belarus rising above Minsk, its many-sided glass-and-steel facade catching the daylight.

The National Library of Belarus illuminated after dark, its faceted exterior lit up in a rotating pattern of colored light over the Minsk skyline.

5. Rijksmuseum Research Library — Amsterdam

The Rijksmuseum Research Library is a private academic art history collection whose first job is preservation, but its reading room does double duty as one of the most beautiful interiors in Amsterdam: tiered cast-iron galleries, a soaring gilded ceiling, and shelf after shelf of priceless volumes arranged like a cathedral built for books rather than worship.

Tiered cast-iron galleries and a gilded ceiling inside the Rijksmuseum Research Library's reading room in Amsterdam, lined with rows of antique volumes. — Cast-iron galleries stack toward a gilded ceiling in the reading room.

One More, For the Road: Trinity College Dublin

No tour of rooms built to make you fall back in love with books is complete without Dublin. The Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College — barrel-vaulted, lined floor to ceiling in dark oak shelving, watched over by marble busts of great thinkers — belongs in this company as much as anything on the continent, and we couldn’t resist closing on it.

The barrel-vaulted Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin, lined floor to ceiling with dark wood shelving and antique books. — The Long Room at Trinity College Dublin, included here as a fitting coda.

Six libraries, and still nowhere near the full list — the world is far richer in extraordinary libraries than any single post can hold. For more architecture built to stop you in your tracks, our running guide to the most extraordinary buildings on Earth is a good place to keep exploring.