Wutopia Lab have transformed a former church in China into a 388sq m (4,176sq ft) poetry bookstore by installing a large freestanding steel frame that provides shelving and creates a space within a space. The St. Nicholas Church in Shanghai was built in 1932 and has variously been used as an office, a factory, a warehouse, a canteen, a residential space, a club and a restaurant. Its historic status meant

A bookstore in Wuhan, China, has reopened after a two-year design and renovation project by Wutopia Lab that has seen a huge "light cone" inserted into the building, drawing natural light from the roof down to all floors. The 10,000sq m (107,600sq ft) Hubei Foreign Language Bookstore was established 40 years ago and has undergone a number of alterations and renovations over the years. Wutopia Lab were keen to re-establish

RDH Architects have converted an old derelict post office in the Candian city of Cambridge, Ontario, into a bookless library with new glass volumes that are cantilevered over the adjacent Grand River. The Idea Exchange provides a free community hub with spaces for learning, creativity, meeting and socialising. The $11.1m (US$8.4m, €7.6m, £6.5m) project combined contemporary additions and design with restored elements of the original building, which was built in

Wolfgang Tschapeller has suspended four levels of library stacks containing around 100,000 volumes in an inverted ziggurat at the Unversity of Cornell 's Mui Ho Fine Arts Library. Tschapeller's goal was to create "a 21st-century interpretation of the grand reading rooms associated with great research collections." To achieve this, he removed the third floor of the Rand Hall building, in which the library is housed, to create a double-height space

Dutch architects MVRDV have completed the Tianjin Binhai Library in China, a 33,700sq m (362,700sq ft) cultural centre featuring a luminous spherical auditorium which doubles as an enormous mirrored ‘eye’. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases cascade organically around the auditorium, forming the building's main spatial device, while also creating stairs, seating, the layered ceiling and louvres on the façade. The five-storey building holds 1.2 million books, which can be taken to a multitude