‘The quality and rarity of the collection of written documents at the Martin Bodmer Foundation, some of them unique, make it an extraordinary cultural heritage.

The library is in Cologny, near Geneva, on land belonging to the vast estate purchased by its founder. It occupies two classical-looking and rather composite buildings.

The planned extension of the buildings consisted in creating a new exhibition space and service areas to display the precious documents to a still wider public.

It was designed as a two-storey hypogenic building standing between the two existing buildings and connected to them at basement level. The entrance to this new space is from the garden, through a sunken courtyard that faces the lakeside.  It is contiguous with the wall that separates it from the road leading to the village.

The exceptional nature of the documents in the collection prompted the idea of designing the exhibition space as a buried casket, with nothing above ground-level except five glass parallelepiped structures on square bases, about 3.5 metres high, and aligned with the axis of the entrance like a set of perspective screens that draw the visitor’s attention to the lake.