Stockholm University Library

British-born architect Ralph Erskine, who spent most of his career working in Sweden, designed the university's Frescati Library with a north facade angled to frame views of Djurgården's nature and an east side folded into a clover shape around a preserved oak grove. King Carl XVI Gustaf inaugurated the building in 1983, following the 1977 reform that made the university library an independent organisation needing a home of its own. Erskine treated the building less like a conventional library and more like a shared living room, with sunbathing balconies, comfortable furniture and a café by the entrance — an approach that made it an influential model for library design elsewhere.