Le
Grande Bibliothèque
is a 33,000 square metre building on
Boulevard De Maisonneuve Est in
Montréal. It is home to 1,140,000
books, 1,200,000 other documents, and
1,660,000 microfiches. The
building contains 80 kilometres of shelf
space within its five storeys. Its
Wikipedia entry says that it is,
“
... clad with U-shaped plates of
glass of a type never used before in
North America, placed horizontally
on the copper uprights that run the
whole height of the building.”
The collections are housed in two
“Chambres de Bois” (wooden rooms),
multi-storey spaces with walls of wooden
slats,
“ ... either allowing
indirect natural light or blocking
it according to the conservation
needs of the collection. The slats
are made of Québec-grown yellow
birch, the official tree of Québec.”
