L. A. Architect and Egypt Make Book on Reviving Alexandria

On this fabled slice of sand and sea that nurtured the union of three civilizations, the emperor Ptolemy I ordered the creation of a library that would house “the books of all the peoples of the world.”

For hundreds of years, starting with Aristotle’s own collection, scrolls of philosophy, art, literature and science were assembled into the greatest compilation of the written word the ancient world had ever known.

The original manuscripts of the dramatic poets Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides rested on its shelves. The Greek translation that made the Hebrew Bible accessible to the Western world reposed in a companion facility nearby.

Studying in the halls of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Aristarchus posited the sun as the center of the solar system and Euclid systematized geometry. Eratosthenes, one in a long line of chief librarians, measured the shadows cast at the summer solstice over Alexandria and Aswan, then calculated the circumference of the Earth.

In what one modern-day official has called “a sobering reminder of how fragile the constructs of the civilized mind can be,” the ancient Alexandria Library disappeared about 2,000 years ago--most likely the victim of a fire when Julius Caesar came to Cleopatra’s aid against her younger brother, Ptolemy XIII, and set the Ptolemy shipping fleet ablaze in Alexandria harbor.

Fanatic Christians are believed to have dispensed with the rest of the collection about 400 years later.

Today, not a trace of the ancient library remains in this decaying port city, and Egypt, the cradle of civilization, stands at the center of a modern region in political and economic turmoil. The old motherland is billions of dollars in debt to the West. Less than half of Egypt’s 55 million people can read.

But declaring that Egypt “can never relinquish its pioneer civilizational role . . . for this is what the world expects of it,” President Hosni Mubarak and an international committee of world leaders have launched a $100-million fund-raising drive to revive the ancient library and restore, if possible, Alexandria’s place as a cultural beacon of the Mediterranean.

With the backing of UNESCO and the United Nations Development Program, the library restoration committee already has broken ground on a site along Alexandria’s famous corniche and unveiled a script-encrusted, glass-topped cylindrical design that resembles a sun rising out of the sand.

As envisioned, the new library would be a major public research facility focusing on Hellenistic antiquity and the Middle East, the meeting of Egyptian and Greek cultures, the birth of Coptic Christianity, the history of ancient science and the influence of Islam. Opening in 1995 with 200,000 volumes, it eventually would house up to 4 million books and worldwide computer linkups.

“It can be a monument to the ecumenical and cohering nature of knowledge, and to do that, it doesn’t have to have all the books in the world,” said Daniel Boorstin, U.S. Librarian of Congress emeritus and a member of the library oversight committee.

The design for the library, selected from an international competition last year, began with a team of young architects, some barely out of college, who realized that a chance to conceive the renovation of the ancient library would be the opportunity of their careers.

Los Angeles architect Craig Dykers, who had been working with the Los Angeles Redevelopment Agency and on the design of a theater in Cerritos, Calif., called his friend Christoph Kapeller, who had joined the Oslo, Norway, architectural firm Snohetta, and proposed entering the design competition together.

For months, Kapeller and Dykers worked out of a small mid-Wilshire office, faxing drawings back to Oslo for review by the other three team members. Oslo would fax back counterproposals. At one point, the whole team drove to Southern California’s Joshua Tree National Park to get a sense of the desert landscape.

“We were very struck by the shapes in the desert, especially when the moon and the sun pass over the desert,” Dykers explains.

Finally, they agreed on the concept of a circular building with a sloping glass roof, part of which pierced down below ground level. Scripts in most languages of the world are engraved on the exterior, with the vast interior a series of book-filled terraces bathed by light from above.

“When it hit, we felt it,” Dykers said. “It was like it knocked on the door, and we let it in and it sat down.”

Added Kapeller: “It was universal. It’s a vault for books, and this is a containing shape. . . . Some people say it’s the rising sun over the Mediterranean. I like that one. It definitely has associations to all sorts of celestial phenomena.”

In the first two days after the February fund-raising opener, $64 million was pledged from Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, enough to construct the building itself. More money is needed to acquire books and equipment, and to set up an endowment for staff and future acquisitions.

Privately, some scholars express skepticism that construction of a grand building can be enough to restore Alexandria to its former prominence. And some predict Western donors will be reluctant to contribute money to a library that may in the end be little more than a local facility for the University of Alexandria.

Moreover, some fear that Egypt, already struggling to maintain its deteriorating archeological treasures and under-financed museums in the midst of a national economic crisis, is ill equipped to take on a project the scale of the Alexandria Library.

But Mubarak counters that Egypt “has initiated the idea of reviving the Alexandria Library because Egypt truly believes that it is not by bread alone that man lives, that culture is the food of thought, conscience and feeling and is in no way less important to man than his material needs.”

Mohsen Zahran, executive director of the committee overseeing the project, said the Egyptian government has committed an annual allocation sufficient to provide for maintenance and staff. Besides, he argues, the library must be an international effort, not merely an Egyptian one.

“We would like the world to build it, not only one region,” he said. “But there is only one Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Nobody can claim the Bibliotheca Alexandrina except Alexandria.”