Notions of access have become pervasive in how we currently speak about libraries and their democratic character, as well as in the ways in which we have come to speak about emerging media technologies and, in both cases, access has very clearly come to mean making things available. Although access as it relates to the library is a relatively recent phenomenon, libraries and access have nearly become synonymous. Yet the presumption of access often obscures lingering problems of inaccessibility to various services and spaces for particular classes of people. This article will examine and document the ways in which the normative priority of "access" has been architecturally materialized within the contemporary library. Through a close analysis of Montreal’s Grande Bibliothèque and the institution’s trajectory from conception to building, this article will explore how architecture has, in part, defined and delimited what sort of institutional public space the Grande Bibliothèque creates. Concepts employed within the preliminary conceptual design phase of the project, such as openness, access, freedom, and publicness, took on new, contradictory meanings when the library materialized, to reveal issues surrounding restriction, control, inaccessibility, and surveillance. I want to lay stress on the process of design and how its various agencies shaped a particular institutional incarnation of the library.