Oodi Central Library

Facing the steps of Finland's Parliament House across Kansalaistori Square, Oodi is Helsinki's showpiece public library, a wave-like structure clad in Finnish spruce that opened in December 2018 as a gift to the nation on the eve of its 101st year of independence. Designed by the Helsinki firm ALA Architects, it was voted the world's best new public library within a year of opening and has since become one of the city's most visited buildings.

Despite the "Central" in its English name, Oodi is not technically the main library in the Helsinki City Library network, an administrative role held by a library in the Pasila district; "central" here refers instead to Oodi's location in the very heart of the city.

Oodi is deliberately not a conventional library. Its 17,250 square metres hold only about 100,000 books at any one time, a small fraction of the 3.5 million items in the wider Helsinki City Library network, with the rest of the building given over to recording studios, workshops, meeting rooms, a cinema and simply space to sit, work or read.

A Gift for Finland's Centenary

Planning for Oodi began with an open international design competition launched in 2012, which drew 543 entries. The winning proposal, submitted under the title Käännös, or "Translation," came from ALA Architects, the Helsinki firm led by Juho Grönholm, Antti Nousjoki and Samuli Woolston. In January 2015 the Helsinki City Council voted 75 to 8 to proceed with the project, budgeted at roughly 98 million euros, of which the Finnish state contributed 30 million as part of the country's plans to mark the centenary of its independence in 2017.

The project also anticipated Finland's 2017 update to its Public Libraries Act, which set out a mandate for libraries to promote lifelong learning, active citizenship, democracy and freedom of expression, giving Oodi's mix of workshops, studios and reading spaces a basis in law as much as in design philosophy.

Choosing a Name

The building went unnamed through most of its construction. At the end of 2016 the city announced it would be called Oodi, Finnish for "ode," a name chosen from around 1,600 suggestions submitted by the public. It opened to visitors on 5 December 2018, one day before Finland's Independence Day, positioned by the city as a birthday gift to its own citizens. Early plans even included a rooftop sauna, a distinctly Finnish touch that was ultimately dropped before completion, though the finished library kept nearly every other public amenity envisioned in the original brief.

Oodi occupies one of the last significant open sites in central Helsinki, closing off the eastern edge of Kansalaistori, or Citizens' Square, directly opposite the Parliament House and within the same cultural cluster as the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, the Sanoma House and the Helsinki Music Centre. Its long form is rectilinear on three sides but curves and twists along its civic face toward the square, an arching, bridge-like shape carried on a steel structure engineered by Ramboll Finland that allows the building's uppermost floor to run column-free.

The exterior is clad in planks of Finnish spruce, a material chosen to soften a building of otherwise industrial scale and to tie it visually to the wooded landscape found across the country. Inside, a sculptural double-helix staircase links the floors, reinforcing the sense that the building's structure is as much a part of the visitor experience as its contents. A fourth level below ground, not open to the public, houses the building's technical and mechanical systems.

Ground Floor: The Active Space

Kansalaistori Square effectively continues indoors on Oodi's ground level, an open, fast-changing floor built for short visits and passing through. It houses a multipurpose event hall, a café and restaurant, a children's playground, exhibition space, and Kino Regina, a cinema run by the National Audiovisual Institute that screens films from the national archive.

Second Floor: The Urban Workshop

The middle level is enclosed within the building's arching form and given over to louder, more hands-on activities. Visitors can use 3D printers, sewing machines, high-quality printers, and recording and video studios, generally paying only for materials used, alongside soundproofed smart-glass meeting rooms and a gaming area.

Third Floor: Book Heaven

The uppermost floor, reached by the open, column-free space the steel structure makes possible, is a quieter reading floor known as Book Heaven, lined with the library's book collection beneath a curved ceiling nicknamed the Book Sky. Reading terraces and the Citizens' Balcony look out over Kansalaistori and the Parliament House, giving readers one of the best publicly accessible views in this part of the city.

Within a year of opening, Oodi was named the winner of the 2019 IFLA/Systematic Public Library of the Year award at the World Library and Information Congress in Athens, chosen from sixteen libraries worldwide as the best newly built public library of the year. The building went on to receive further recognition in 2020, including the European Steel Design Award and Finland's own Finlandia Prize for Architecture, and it was shortlisted as a finalist for the European Union's Mies van der Rohe Award.

Oodi remains free to enter and use, open seven days a week, and functions as much as a public living room and workspace as a traditional library. The library was designed to accommodate as many as 10,000 visitors a day, a scale closer to a transit hub or shopping centre than a traditional reading room, and its ground floor in particular sees a constant flow of people passing through between the square outside and Helsinki Central Station nearby.

Weekday mornings tend to be the quietest time to visit, before students and remote workers fill the second and third floors' desks and reading nooks. Weekends and school holidays bring heavier crowds, particularly to the ground-floor children's areas and the cinema, so those wanting a calmer visit to Book Heaven are better off arriving early on a weekday.

• Head to the third-floor Citizens' Balcony for one of the best free views of Kansalaistori Square and the Parliament House
• Book equipment such as 3D printers, sewing machines or recording studios in advance if a specific facility is the goal of the visit
• Check the Kino Regina screening schedule if classic or archival Finnish film is of interest
• Bring a laptop or a book; the second and third floors are set up as much for quiet work as for reading
• Visit outside weekday afternoons and weekends for a quieter experience, especially on the upper floors

• The Parliament House (Eduskuntatalo), directly across Kansalaistori Square
• Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, a short walk from the library
• Helsinki Music Centre, part of the same Töölönlahti cultural cluster
• Helsinki Central Railway Station, within easy walking distance
• Finlandia Hall and Töölö Bay, a short walk further north