Better in silence: eight libraries and museums where the quiet is the architecture

Tianjin Binhai Library. It holds 1.2 million books — the dream of any writer or keen reader. Signed by the Dutch practice MVRDV and set in the Binhai cultural district, this entirely white, science-fiction library is a tide of knowledge held in place. The books sit on undulating shelves that double as terraces, so visitors can walk along them and also sit down to read and forget the rest of the world, if only for a while.

Denver Art Museum. If a crumpled ball of paper the size of a stadium could be a building, it would be the bristling façade of the Denver Art Museum. Designed by Studio Libeskind, with rooms devoted to architecture, design, painting, sculpture, photography and fashion, it stands out for its minimalism and for the clean lines inside, which invite you to admire not only the works but the design that holds them.

Yangzhou Zhongshuge. To step into this bookshop in Yangzhou is to sink into a tunnel of infinite books. Designed by the architect Li Xiang, this magical place has arched walls and black mirror floors you walk across as though crossing a calm, dark sea. The bookshop stands for the meeting point between people and the classical and contemporary wisdom of every author gathered there.

Museu Oscar Niemeyer. In Curitiba, in the state of Paraná, Brazil, designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, this museum takes the almond shape of the eye that sees everything. Raised on a titanic yellow pillar, the clouds are reflected in its glazed front. It holds work in architecture, design and the visual arts, and, of course, its own collection. A space that invites not only looking but thinking.

Conarte Library. A space that, as well as encouraging reading, engages the senses through an avant-garde design and the geometric play of its walls and ceilings. In Monterrey, Mexico, designed by the studio Anagrama, Conarte is small and emphatic, with mint-green floors and vaulted ceilings and walls full of what could be wooden honeycombs — except that instead of honey, they hold books.

Museo Soumaya. Its name means “enemy of superficiality, a reliable person, one who can be counted on and who keeps her word”. One of its two sites is in the Polanco district of Mexico City — the other is at Plaza Loreto. The Plaza Carso building has a turned, gleaming, silver façade that recalls the scaled body of a fish, and has become a landmark of Polanco. Built by the architect Fernando Romero, it holds works of decorative art, Asian ivory, European Old Masters and pieces from Impressionism to the avant-gardes, among others.

Vennesla Library. From outside it has a straight geometry, with vertical bars rising from floor to ceiling; inside, the lines melt. Once in the Vennesla library, in Norway, the morphology is wooden floors, and the walls and ceiling form a great rib cage of laminated wood — which could be the ribs of a whale — designed by the practice Helen & Hard.

Hanoi Museum. In Hanoi, Vietnam, this museum has a façade in the shape of an inverted trapezium, its base smaller than its roof, and the pools of water around it reflect a doubled image, creating the same optical illusion as the Dutch artist M.C. Escher’s impossible staircases. Designed by Meinhard von Gerkan, Nikolaus Goetze and Klaus Lenz, it is the place to learn the history of Hanoi, walking through recreations of Vietnamese villages while climbing and descending a spiral staircase that recalls the Guggenheim in New York.

Silence reigns in museums and libraries — but not only there. It reigns too when Iskin Sisters works, making and thinking new pieces in the strictest concentration and from the inside out. Because, as the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote, “silence is the element in which all great things fashion themselves”.

Photographs of these buildings are not reproduced here, as the rights belong to their photographers and to the practices that designed them.