At the end of the decade of the nineties, the then Rector of the EAFIT University, Dr. Juan Felipe Gaviria, conceived the idea of building a true campus reflecting the intellectual expansion of the University towards other areas of knowledge, like Music and the Humanities. The Library would be the guiding element, ordering and completing a great central plaza that would serve as a meeting place for professors and students. The most prestigious architects of the city were invited to compete for its design. The winners were Carlos Julio Calle and Juan Fernando Forero.

Both conceived of the Library as a great temple of learning. The staircase that begins its ascent in the central plaza and that culminates in the third story of the building, symbolizes the ascent of consciousness by means of knowledge. The metaphor is multiplied en the spatial distribution of the edifice, a series of boxes within boxes, illuminated from above by an outpouring of light and surrounded outside y a mirror of water. When they are studied, the books emerge from the inner spaces of the Library in the second and third stories towards the light that surrounds the building on all four sides. The fourth floor is dedicated exclusively to conferences and the work of researchers, and the ground floor houses a spacious Art Center where the best contemporary art of the country is displayed.

Separate from the building, but united by a series of bridges, is the Technical Tower. There is found the machinery that runs the elevators, the bathrooms, the hydraulic station, and the halls for group study, that is to say all those elements that may generate some kind of noise that would disturb the silence of students and readers in the second and third floors.

The "Luis Echavarría Villegas" Cultural Center Library, constantly supports the institutional objectives of teaching, research and extension, by appraising, acquiring, classifying, finding and circulating printed or digital material, supplementing in a fair way the information needs of all the academic departments of EAFIT. The Library is at the same time both physical and virtual, and it possesses a diversity of resources of its own as well as of other institutions to which the students, employees and external users have access, by means of national and international networks.

Serve as a facilitating means for achieving the objectives of teaching-learning, research and extension, by making information resources available in the form of text, image and sound, with our own resources and those of other institutions that are linked to us by means of national and international networks within an environment of excellence in services and products.

The Library of University EAFIT must as objective serve as average for the objectives profit of education-learning, investigation and extension by means of the provision resources of information in text and image.