Desert Embroidery's Mobile Library in Lakia

Looks like a shelf stacked with kids' books in Arabic and Hebrew, right?

Actually it is the side of a truck, a library on wheels!

The project was started 15 years ago by some very energetic and courageous Bedouin women with vision living in the town of Lakia, here in the Negev.
The Mobile Library travels around Lakia.
It also goes out to several settlements in the Bedouin "diaspora" which are not recognized by the State of Israel.

The library's webpage, where you can see more photos, explains like this:

Although 58% of Lakia’s 10,000 residents are children, Lakia has no public library.  The Mobile Library Project was set up in 2000 to provide children in Lakia and the unrecognized villages in the area with an opportunity to read and exchange books to improve their reading skills, instill a love of reading and facilitate their educational achievement.
Three days a week, the Mobile Library travels in Lakia and the unrecognized villages of Abu Kef, Owajan and Alatresh, all of which are denied municipal services. At each stop enthusiastic children check out books in Arabic, Hebrew and English. Volunteer university students organize story hours and operate the library in exchange for a small stipend. We estimate that the library reaches some 1,750 children of all ages.
Future plans for the Mobile Library include extending operations to a full week, the expansion of library visits to more unrecognized villages for the benefit of even more children, development of an area for games, and the procurement of new books.

 The library is only one of the projects of Desert Embroidery, Association for the Improvement of Women's Status, Lakia.
We can learn a lot by reading the three sections of Overview at the website and then looking through the other text and photos.
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(Linking to Our World Tuesday and signs, signs.)
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Béton brut --> Brutalism at Ben-Gurion University

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For better or for worse,  Beer Sheva is called our capital of Brutalism.*
And the city's Ben-Gurion University is full of Brutalist architecture. 
BGU's main library, for instance, whose cornerstone was laid in 1971.

 From the Aranne Library website:

In designing the library building, the architects wanted to bring several ideas to life:
The building was planned to be washed in natural light – present in abundance in the Negev - which,  diffused from the North (to eliminate the direct rays of the sun),  floods the library's reading areas. . . .
The combination of concrete, dark in appearance and representing durability in desert conditions,  and gleaming cupolas made of glass mosaic, expresses the blending of material with light.

Here is the back of the library. 

* From Wikipedia:

The English architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term in 1953, from the French béton brut, or "raw concrete", a phrase used by Le Corbusier to describe the poured board-marked concrete with which he constructed many of his post-World War II buildings.
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Brutalist architecture is a style of architecture that flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, spawned from the modernist architectural movement. Examples are typically very linear, fortresslike and blockish, often with a predominance of concrete construction. Initially the style came about for government buildings, low-rent housing and shopping centres to create functional structures at a low cost, but eventually designers adopted the look for other uses such as college buildings.

UPDATE: Here is a nice new article about the beauty of Brutalism.
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(Linking to ABC Wednesday, Whimsical Windows, Delirious Doors, and Our World Tuesday.)
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