The premise of this thesis project is the design of a new central public library for the city of Graz, Austria. The city’s library branches are currently distributed in pre-existing buildings throughout the city, lacking a central building that both contains the multitude of spaces inherent to the contemporary public library and that asserts its own architectural identity. The city of Graz itself has a long and layered past, with a medieval core that is still at the heart of the city. The selected site sits on the edge of both the historic center and the city’s main green space, the Stadtpark, and is bordered by both a late-Renaissance gate and a remnant of the city’s historic fortification wall. This position allows the project to also ad­dress questions of how we build today in confrontation with the historic city and its fabric. Starting from studies of the layered morphology of the historic center and the typologi­cal system that constitutes the Stadtpark, this project ultimately considers the collective memory of the city, and how a new insertion into the existing fabric might reflect and augment that memory. The result is the design of a public library building that learns from its con­text and that, through a careful act of architectural composition, seeks to offer a quiet yet meaningful new contribution to the city of Graz.