An extensive alteration and addition successfully integrates this new-generation library into the existing university fabric, transforming the current ‘introverted’ library model to an ‘extroverted’ facility by opening up the building, creating vistas and introducing light. The traditional notion of library as book repository has been superseded and reinterpreted as a place of learning and socialising. A dramatic circulation spine manipulates volume, form and materials in a space that engages with users and the wider university. The building is connected to its environment by a series of transition spaces, and the eastern façade, with its twisted steel fins, provides environmental control while offering a new, vigorous campus ‘sign post.’ This building is an example of the power of design to both reflect and provoke changing modes of thinking, working and, in this case, studying.