An ever changing journey
Imagine yourself walking through an unknown city with just the popular sights on your mind. You have a goal but to your surprise it is not the sight that is interesting, it is the journey. On your way to the major sights you come across a lot of nice small shops, fascinating people and never heard of places, you get to know the city. Is it possible to create such an experience in the library of the future or even in the library of today?
To come to the point of travelling we first have to go back to the foundation of the library: the books. Will there be physical books in 2040 or will it all be digital? In the vision we present, a large amount of the books will be digital just because they don’t need that extra physical qualities. Books that will exist in physical form are the ones that are still able to touch multiple senses, like well printed art books or charismatic antique books with big physical value.
The library of today is in our perception a statue, a slow moving entity of information. It is not that much more than a depository for books. This depot has no eye for the information in the books, the wishes of its visitors and the outcome of all the searches done by them. These are opportunities that can be explored by the libraries. Implementing some of this information into the library can make it more flexible or hybrid. This is where our vision comes in to play and where visiting the library becomes an ever changing journey.
Our idea focuses on the architecture of the library, the physical architecture as well as the digital. The proposal for the digital architecture can be implemented now and can also be an improvement for the present day physical architecture. The design for the physical architecture of the future library is more of a visualisation of our idea. The building should be read as a metaphor and represents different journeys through the library. So it is not a definite design but a image to trigger future library building.
With the digital architecture we come back to the desired journey. In our design we create a place where all the journeys through the library are recorded. We capture all the information and notations from every visitor and make them visible for other users without being curated by the library personnel. The place where all this can happen is called the digital en-space. The name refers to the term en-space as introduced by architect Kisho Kurokawa. It is the space between public and private spaces like the engawa, the special Japanese porch. In our vision the digital space we create is exactly such a place were the visitor puts a personal or private layer upon the public library, they come together in the digital en-space.
The added value for the physical architecture will be the use of the results from the digital en-space in a physical library. It will be a library that changes according to the new information that is put in by its users. The new information exists of subjects that are linked by the visitors through their journeys and their entries in the digital en-space. It is also possible to request information in advance as an individual or group so you can work or meet in the library with the desired information around you. These two inputs will be the foundation of the ever changing interior of the library. The interior changes every day so the journey through the library will always be different. When groups request certain information they will cause rearrangement of the cabinets and they can create their own places in the library. Temporary in-between spaces where the public library becomes private. These physical en-spaces are surrounded by information in different forms, books, audio or digital content. The people who come together in these temporary shared spaces can create new information for the digital en-space. These places can appear in all kind of forms; reading rooms, workshops, movie theatres, playing rooms, cafés, music rooms, exhibition places, theatres, forums, laboratories, meeting- or silent rooms. The library becomes a mixed-use facility where people can not only gain knowledge but also contribute to it.
Designed together with Bas van Raay, JP Melville, Jochem Ruijgrok en Naomi Yasuda.
Assignment by Vereniging van Bibliotheken
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