Giorgio Bassani City Library, Ferrara

The Bassani library stands in the Barco district, next to the market place.
The complex consists of three volumes in parallel, all one-storey. The central and higher one contains a conference hall for 120 people, an exhibition area, a patio and a reading room on two staggered levels. The lower volumes contain the offices, the catalogue, the multimedia library and the children’s library, with its own outdoor space inset in the public park.
The patio is the heart of the building and all of the living spaces cluster around it. It is a protected ambient, screened by grid shading and with two large glazed walls that allow a visual relationship between the atrium and the reading room.
The presence of the new library has significantly improved the Ferrara citizens’ opinion of the Barco district.
The Bassani library has been exhibited in Rome, Parma and Ferrara and has been published often in books and magazines, such as the design manual by TecnoTipo Biblioteche, in Edilizia Popolare, pp. 277-278 and in AR, p. 57, among others.