SCI-Arc M.Arch II
Date: Spring 2019
Instructor: Damjan Jovanovic
Teammate: Zepeng Gao
"...the library is a physical expression of the struggle to maintain the sanctity of public space and build an efficient, technological machine in a world that is in a constant state of flux."
-Rem Koolhaas, Mattern, 2007:75.
With the 2GBX studio, the curriculum shifts its attention to the study of the relationship of architecture and spatial expression of differential collections of knowledge or information. The studio project is for a public library in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, to replace Marcel Breuer's Central Atlanta Library and is to be conceived in relation to the current controversy surrounding the status of the existing building. The studio's main focus is on disciplinary questions of the relationships amongst typology, function, and aesthetics. These questions will be considered as they relate to current issues of media, technology, and access.
Our proposal of the Atlanta Central Library is suggesting a model where individual reading room and individual housing unit being aggregated together, creating different types of void space. The central void, or the atrium, is where physical books are transposed into digital data and then visually expressed in the form of holographic technology. Smaller void between each unit brings in densely aggregated natural light spot, creating a juxtaposition of both natural and artificial light within the atrium.
Regarding function, we would like to encourage our users to read not only privately in each individual reading room or collectively in the monumental grand reading room, but also interactively through the interface with our cloud reading technology located in the atrium. From there, users can either upload the books they are reading to the cloud and share it visually with everyone else from other reading room or housing unit, or download whatever they found entertaining from the cloud server, creating a collective memory among the users of the library. Hence, both the reading room and housing unit together contribute to a digital reading village where information and common identity is shared vastly, a world of its own.
Regarding form, our proposal argues that the architectural representation of Atlanta Central Library should be an aggregation of volumes, where both mankind and knowledge of mankind concentrated in order to compose an open space where they interact digitally, efficiently, and simultaneously. However, aggregation of volumes should never be confused with stacking of mass, where architectural volumes firmly tied themselves together with programmatic distribution. In fact, the traditional pattern of aggregated volumes require a building envelope of aggregated objects and a building interior of mass-stacking structure. This type of pattern is fundamentally a toy shell, where the exterior envelope has no relation with the inner volume or whatsoever. We are here to break this pattern. Hence, we suggest an aggregation of volumes composing of smaller individual volumes, in a way that is not so separated by connecting each other with the absence of objects but the presence of data, light, and shadow.
