Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, partners of the Tokyo-based design firm SANAA, were selected as the lead architects in EPFL's international competition in December 2004.

The building opened on 22 February 2010 and was inaugurated on 27 May 2010.

I started the documentation of the construction in late summer of 2007. In the following three years the progress on site was captured in a few hundred photographs.

The main library, containing 500,000 printed works, is one of the largest scientific collections in Europe.