National Library of Kosovo

The building is immediately unlike anything else in Pristina. The structural system is exposed concrete — raw, heavy, geometric — and the outer skin is a double-layer of concrete panels studded with thousands of small glass boxes that project from the facade at irregular intervals. From a distance the effect is of a surface alive with light; up close you realise each projection is a small study alcove with a window, jutting from the concrete like a instrument panel, each one a private space for a reader to work in natural light.

The original design was by the Italian architect Qamil Kaleshi, whose work straddled Yugoslav and Italian modernism, and the building was completed in 1974 when Pristina was still the capital of the Socialist Republic of Kosovo within Yugoslavia. The political context of the commission — a new national institution for a population that did not yet have full republic status within Yugoslavia — is written into the building's ambitions, which are notably grander than what a provincial library normally requires.

Inside the main reading hall is a vast open plan space lit by skylights set into the concrete roof, with the book stacks arranged along the perimeter and readers at long tables in the centre. The acoustic is surprisingly quiet for a large open space, the concrete surfaces having been designed with absorption in mind, and the natural light from the skylights changes character through the day, making the space feel different in the morning than at midday.

The library holds approximately two million items, including a significant collection of Ottoman-era documents in Arabic script relating to Kosovo's history, and material from the Albanian National Renaissance that forms one of the most important collections of 19th-century Albanian-language print culture anywhere. These collections make the library a genuine research institution, important beyond its symbolic architectural value.

The building became politically contested after Kosovo's independence declaration in 2008: the Serbian minority in Kosovo considers it a symbol of Albanian national identity rather than a shared institution, and the building's symbolic weight has been part of its difficulty in establishing a clear institutional identity in the post-independence period. The architecture itself became a focal point in the culture wars over Kosovo's statehood.

From the outside the building reads differently at different times of day: in morning light the projecting window boxes cast sharp geometric shadows across the concrete face; at night they glow orange from within, making the whole facade into a grid of warm light against the dark concrete, an effect that has been widely photographed and is one of the most distinctive night scenes in the city.

The library is in the western part of Pristina's university campus area, a short walk from the main university building and the Mother Teresa Boulevard, and the surrounding area has been developed since 2000 into the most modern part of the city, making the building's brutalist 1970s aesthetic feel increasingly anomalous in its surroundings, an artifact of a different era of Yugoslav ambition.

One of the most architecturally distinctive public buildings in the Balkans, the double-skin concrete facade with thousands of projecting window boxes is a unique formal invention with no direct precedent.

The building is a primary example of Yugoslav Brutalism and the intersection of modernist architecture with national identity politics in the 1970s Balkans.

The library's collections include significant Ottoman and Albanian National Renaissance archival material that makes it a genuine research institution, not only a symbol.