Qatar National Library

This guide to Qatar National Library opens with a puzzle: sources disagree on how many manuscripts sit in its sunken heritage collection. It traces how architect Rem Koolhaas, shaped by childhood memories of illustrated books, designed a single folded concrete shell that puts nearly every shelf on view at once. Along the way it covers a 1478 map, drawn by an apprentice of Johannes Gutenberg, and a hand-turned globe made by cartographer Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr in 1728.