The building is a field of columns supporting modular catwalks of books. One ascends to the books from the main reading floor and yet one can also inhabit the catwalks in seating nooks cut from the shelves.

The 3x3 cutouts from the grid are stairwells that go from the roofscape to the 1st floor. They are also rainwater collectors.

As with the Pompidou, one enters from the top - going first through a public plaza. The promenade takes you into the plaza, up the elevator, across the roofscape and past the auditorium, down into the stairwells and out onto the elevated ramps containing the books where you filter down onto the main circulation floor. Here you have a beer at the central bar - flip through the book you've selected, decide that it is crap and shelve it in the most inaccessible and overlooked shelf before exiting past the librarians and back out onto the plaza, where you can take another ramp directly down to the street.

Here, at the bottom, is that bar I mentioned.

The sub-level (which is actually street level) and the auditorium at the top are the only places which do not have the field of columns. This sub-level houses various sized meeting rooms between the thick slab supporting the floors above. It is a cave to the aviary of the "rampscape" above.