− Aberdeen City Garden _ Diller Scofidio+Renfro
− Wendy, the 2012 YAP MoMA PS1 _ HWKN
− Water Cathedral, the 2011 YAP Constructo _ GUN Arquitectos
Archipulse
A Stroll in the Park _ Cathelijne Nuijsink
− Hiroshi Senju Museum Karuizawa _ Office of Ryue Nishizawa
Library Opens
Borges, the Library and the Infinite _ Marco Atzori
− The New City Library in Turku _ JKMM Architects
− New Town Library in Maranello _ Arata Isozaki+Andrea Maffei
− Ann Arbor District Library _ inFORM studio
− LiYuan Library _ Li Xiaodong Atelier
− Arabian Library _ Richard+Bauer
− Taltal Public Library _ Murua Valenzuela Arquitectos
− Research Library in Hradec Kralove _ Projektil Architekti
− Kanazawa Umimirai Library _ Coelacanth K&H Architects
Fuses – Viader Arquitectes
A Silence for the Long Haul _ Marta Gonzalez Anton
− Calonge Summer Residence
− Sant Feliu Yacht Club
− Catalonia Government Administrative Services
− Architects Association in the Girona old town
− Sant Marti d’Empuries Visitor Center
C3 no.331 (2012 #3/12)
Library Opens
Borges, the Library and the Infinite _ Marco Atzori
The library, perhaps more so than the museum, is the space of knowledge accumulation and stratification, even as the museum has in recent years been the subject of deep reflection with regard to its typology and its typological programmatics. Although the library has tended not to be subject to the consumeristic processes that have shaped contemporary museums, the politics of urban landmarking have nonetheless altered its formal conception.
Amid the rise of various new forms of knowledge and considerable technological changes in communications media, the traditional library has been a declining presence in lieu of particularized and specialized subforms: the mediatheque, the hemerotheque and the ludotheque. Finally, given the necessity to create new forms of public space, more condensed and differently capable of being intrinsically attractive, the library has been the site of expanded programmatic options.
Libraries—and places of culture in general—have increasingly become locations for the representation of public space. Densified in terms of their program, places of contemporary knowledge have introduced and welcomed urban chaos into themselves, and have moved away from the immutability of space imagined by Borges in his novel “The Library of Babel” (1941) and demonstrated in Louis Kahn’s Exeter Library (1965-1972). Into the contemporary library has encroached the city and its sense of time.
We can no longer imagine metaphysical and timeless spaces, but areas in direct contact with the contradictions of the present time. The concept of the library is losing its sacred aura even as it takes on the new possibilities connected with reality.
This interpretation of complexity defines the lines of research represented by the projects that will be analyzed in this article. Their materials and forms, as well as their programmatic strategies and functional distributions, evince possible solutions for libraries of the present and future.
C3 no.331 (2012 #3/12)
Library Opens
Borges, the Library and the Infinite _ Marco Atzori
The library, perhaps more so than the museum, is the space of knowledge accumulation and stratification, even as the museum has in recent years been the subject of deep reflection with regard to its typology and its typological programmatics. Although the library has tended not to be subject to the consumeristic processes that have shaped contemporary museums, the politics of urban landmarking have nonetheless altered its formal conception.
Amid the rise of various new forms of knowledge and considerable technological changes in communications media, the traditional library has been a declining presence in lieu of particularized and specialized subforms: the mediatheque, the hemerotheque and the ludotheque. Finally, given the necessity to create new forms of public space, more condensed and differently capable of being intrinsically attractive, the library has been the site of expanded programmatic options.
Libraries—and places of culture in general—have increasingly become locations for the representation of public space. Densified in terms of their program, places of contemporary knowledge have introduced and welcomed urban chaos into themselves, and have moved away from the immutability of space imagined by Borges in his novel “The Library of Babel” (1941) and demonstrated in Louis Kahn’s Exeter Library (1965-1972). Into the contemporary library has encroached the city and its sense of time.
We can no longer imagine metaphysical and timeless spaces, but areas in direct contact with the contradictions of the present time. The concept of the library is losing its sacred aura even as it takes on the new possibilities connected with reality.
This interpretation of complexity defines the lines of research represented by the projects that will be analyzed in this article. Their materials and forms, as well as their programmatic strategies and functional distributions, evince possible solutions for libraries of the present and future.
