nothing deep...just a pretty picture...

Beauty and the Book | Libraries in the digital age raise questions about the place of books. | | Building Types Study | Architectural Record

Beauty and the Book | Libraries in the digital age raise questions about the place of books. | | Building Types Study | Architectural Record

W.T.H. is a Nolli map

Giovanni Battista Nolli, "Nuova Topografia di Roma" (12 sheets, total dim. 1760 x 2080 mm), 1748

The 1748 Nolli map of Rome, regarded by scholars and cartographers as one of the most important historical documents of the city, serves to geo-reference a vast body of information to better understand the Eternal City and its key role in shaping Western Civilization. Giambattista Nolli (1701-1756) was an architect and surveyor who lived in Rome and devoted his life to documenting the architectural and urban foundations of the city. The fruit of his labor, La Pianta Grande di Roma ("the great plan of Rome") is one of the most revealing and artistically designed urban plans of all time. The Nolli map is an ichnographic plan map of the city, as opposed to a bird’s eye perspective, which was the dominant cartographic representation style prevalent before his work. Not only was Nolli one of the first people to construct an ichnographic map of Rome, his unique perspective has been copied ever since.

Detail with the Piazza Navona on the left and the Pantheon on the right

The map depicts the city in astonishing detail. Nolli accomplished this by using scientific surveying techniques, careful base drawings, and minutely prepared engravings. The map's graphic representations include a precise architectural scale, as well as a prominent compass rose, which notes both magnetic and astronomical north. The Nolli map is the first accurate map of Rome since antiquity and captures the city at the height of its cultural and artistic achievements. The historic center of Rome has changed little over the last 250 years; therefore, the Nolli map remains one of the best sources for understanding the contemporary city.

The Nolli map reflects Bufalini's map of 1551, with which Nolli readily invited comparison, however Nolli made a number of important innovations. Nolli reoriented the city from east (which was conventional at the time) to magnetic north, reflecting Nolli's reliance on the compass to get a bearing on the city's topography.


How is a Nolli map different than a figure-ground diagram?

Nolli map on the left and contemporary figure-ground diagram of Rome

Though Nolli follows Bufalini in using a figure-ground representation of built space with blocks and building shaded in a dark poché, Nolli represents enclosed public spaces such as the colonnades in St. Peter's Square and the Pantheon as open civic spaces.

A figure-ground diagram is a two-dimensional map of an urban space that shows the relationship between built and unbuilt space. It is akin to but not the same as a Nolli map which denotes public space both within and outside buildings and also akin to a block pattern diagram that records public and private property as simple rectangular blocks. Two of the biggest advocates of its use were Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter (see their canonical book "Collage City", 1978).

In that sense, the white areas of the Nolli map (all the surfaces one can walk) reveal the extension of the public realm into the buildings of the city. Its significance lies in the fact that it is a very immediate communicator of the "permeable" or "porous" ground levels of the city and the more inaccessible ones. Think for example, what would be the difference of a Nolli map along Newbury St. and Downtown Boston? The Midtown on Manhattan and the Downtown area? How can one understand a bit more of the urban fabric he is asked to operate on through such observations?

Sources: The Interactive Nolli Map Website & Wikipedia


Contemporary examples: 

Shen Fei Lam, map from project "A Subdivided Skyscraper", Diploma 9, AA 2010

Lilith van Assen, Lieke van Hooijdonk and Elsbeth Ronner, "The metamorphosis of Coolsingel, or the benign demolition of the City", TU Delft, Netherlands 2010

Shape of Berlin

Berlin in pieces; cartography-based artwork by French artist Armelle Caron (via Landscape+Urbanism)

Christine’s post reminded me of a “shape-related” project that I recently saw online.  The cartography-based artwork by French artist Armelle Caron concentrates solely on the shape of urban blocks.  Taken out of topographic context, a re-ordering of the city blocks with respect to shape and size reveals an underlying organization of scale.  This project might add another dimension to Somol’s concept of the empty shape.  Somol suggests that shape involves itself with the “contextual and situational.”  Caron’s work demonstrates that even without context and situation, shape has its own native order which enables it to relate to other shapes.  The density (or lack thereof) of our urban environments is therefore a product of these many shapes and how they relate to one another to produce context.

Border Protection

U.S./Canadian border, Haskell Library, VT.  (photo via The Center for Land Use Interpretation.)

When claiming that libraries represent a defined realm within public space, we are actually reinforcing the notion that there is some border, however ambiguous it may be, between two worlds: the private and the public.  As access to public knowledge depends less on where you are and more on what type of communication technology you may be using, there is a good chance that the distinctions between the public and the private become less perceptible or less important.  That being said, it is unlikely that we will ever fully dispense with the (perhaps evolutionary) need to erect and maintain thresholds between physical public and private space.

An interesting example of how we are prone to express essentially imaginary lines in space is the public library in Derby Line, Vermont (if you are Canadian, you might prefer to call it the public library in Stanstead, Quebec).  The Haskell Public Library deliberately straddles the U.S./Canadian border.  Here, the cartographic image of “border” is rendered visible directly through the library, running uninterrupted between book carts and dusty periodicals.  This painted line embodies our need to maintain boundaries, even when the functional business of the immediate locale (in this case the library) would continue to operate with or without such overt partitioning.  It turns out that boundary-marking is a manifestation of psychological and cultural needs; it satisfies our need to know we are here while everything on the other side of the line is there.  There are, of course, some practical purposes of visible borders as pointed out by The Center for Land Use Interpretation:

“The line painted on the floor inside the library and opera house is more than just a novelty. Apparently it was required in order to show which portions of the structure and furnishings would be covered by the separate Canadian and American insurance policies.”

Insurance and other mundane issues aside, a library is an environment full of major and minor divisions between a whole range of public and private spaces.  If the modern library is virtually unbounded and thus prone to obscure traditional boundaries  within our public environments, should the architect try to maintain images of those fleeting boundaries through programmatic, graphic, or even more subtle strategies?  Maybe a bold, black line on the floor and walls is completely appropriate on our age of shifting informational and social boundaries.

See BLDGBLOG for a discussion of the Haskell Library in geo-political terms.

ANYTHINK

This is a new library organization idea from Colorado I discovered in Library Journal a couple of months ago. It has sparked a growth in library use in the community. (http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/ljinprintcurrentissue/887538-403/in_the_country_of_anythink.html.csp)

SHAPE

Reflecting back upon the site study I completed this week, shape was initially influenced on immediate contextual surroundings. On Parcel 13 I am drawn to connect the old MBTA entrance with the BAC studio space in the old ICA building. After constructing a nolli plan I feel I need to revisit the massing of the site and reflect a larger context of the way blocks are formed in the neighborhood. I think the central void could, similar to the city blocks in the Back Bay, create additional gathering space for students of different arts to converge and collaborate. In addition to the nolli map, Somol's "12 Reasons to Get back into Shape" defines shape as Boyant, among other things. I think that buoyancy could be particularly interesting on the Parcel 13 site because the buildings are "floating" above the Mass Pike. I have not yet resolved how to incorporate this.

This is old, but in case some of you havent seen it...

http://inhabitat.com/new-uk-library-fits-within-a-phone-booth/

MM

Hi all! I finally caught up with all the readings and would like to make a few comments on some of them.

I really enjoyed the interviews, especially one of them – with Dominique Perrault. Perhaps this is not going to be a library-related comment, but rather a very generic one, but I absolutely loved how he said that “architecture is a violent action”. Specifically, he talks about walls and how placing a wall that would separate a space is a “violent action” and almost an intrusion into privacy. I think this statement is absolutely astonishing. Quite often, in studios we tend to forget the importance of a plan. We are often too engaged with the conceptual design and at the end we merely disperse the programmatic elements based on the principle “what can fit where”. I love plans and often become obsessed with its perfect organization. I think that every wall, every door, etc if it’s placed somewhere – there has to be a specific reason why. Only then it would be possible to create a meaningful space that would work both inside and out!

I also loved how he talked about facades and materials (materials, especially). He said that everything in architecture can be considered a material – the client, the site, the context. I think that we tend to forget about this too. It is extremely hard however, to remember all the parts of the design and their importance and incorporate them into the final scheme.

here is a link for inspiration: (matthew this is right up your alley!)

http://feltron.com/

i am sure you have all seen this (his) work at some point, but i find myself going back to it pretty often. so many different ways to interpret information and they look so good! make sure to check out the blog too.

Somol's "Shape"

After a couple of readings of Somol's "12 Reasons to Get Back into Shape" his intentions for the article became a bit more clear. I looked up shape and form in my dictionary, and there really is very little difference between the two according to Webster, but again, after the a couple of readings Somol's distinction is a bit more clear. How I interpreted his thoughts is as follows: Massing and Form are two popular avenues architects take to determine the appearance of a project. Massing is the exterior expression of interior function. Form on the other hand is a response to external forces. This response ultimately affects the organization and appearance of the interior. Somol's argument is that this does not have to be our approach. The exterior "shape" can be used to respond to exterior forces, or to frame the city in a new and better way. Additionally, the interior - although constrained in some way by the limits imposed on it by the exterior envelope - can adhere to its own set of rules. In fact, the divergence of the interior and exterior "shapes" creates the opportunity for some pretty terrific interior spacial volumes, both in size and "shape".

Ultimately, Somol's "shape" approach allows us designers a little more latitude in developing more successful interior and exterior spaces in the built environment. This article has definitely affected my approach to the massing excercise due in 8 hours or so.

The Wall and the Wall Library

The Garden Library for Refugees and Migrant Workers, Tel Aviv.  Yoav, Meiri Architects

Archdaily has recently posted a project demonstrating how a library might exist beyond its traditional, institutional form.  The “garden library” is an example of what I have been interested in, generally, in our early research on the building type---a library that is deployed into the community it serves.  It is a form of anti-institution, one that delivers public information outside of a formal, institutional setting.  

Besides sharing this project, I also want to discuss how it might relate to Laura and Evan’s comments regarding Perrault’s description of the “wall” as architectonic violence.  I will let Archdaily describe the particulars of the garden library, but the fact that the library is reduced entirely to a single book-laden wall provides an interesting corollary to Perrault’s point of view.  In this case, the wall services a population on the fringe of society.  As with many disenfranchised sectors of modern society, those without access to public information services are usually the ones who are in most need of those entitlements.  If the “wall” as Perrault perceives it, as architectural device and symbol, is fundamentally about hierarchy and divisions of power (which is how I interpret Perrault’s sentiment), then the garden library conforms to that metaphor.  Ironically, the book-wall of the garden library subverts the “wall’s” stratifying potential by offering an under-serviced community free access to knowledge.  This is a thought-provoking twist on the traditional, enclosed library which surely signifies an alternate “attitude towards the quality and status of the wall”.

Just as a matter of trivia, I also find it interesting that the “wall library” was a specific, common library typology until the 18^th century (reference “The Library through History”).  As noted, it was the over-abundance of printed material that forced the wall library model into obsolescence, as the interior perimeters alone were no longer capable of housing burgeoning collections.  Perhaps, the garden library demonstrates how the “wall library” might find a second-life.  Instead of delimiting spacious, decorated enclosures, it becomes a free-standing object (of information) within the landscape.  The wall library may now be best suited for micro-collections that operate, physically and figuratively, within a field of social and political engagement.

Architects on Architecture

So I finally got around to reading the Toyo Ito Wiel Arets discussion of his library project and a few of his answers hit home for me. He mentions that he felt up until the Sendai Mediatheque that he designed in either the transparent-cubic or the fluid-organic, but in that project he was able to unite the two concepts. I have been thinking how after doing the keyword chart for the Library Index that I would ultimately like to use as many of those ideas as possible, within programmatic reason. It was inspiring to hear him say that he believes his integration was successful.

The interview also mentions that the original contest required a public library, an art gallery, a film and media center, and an information center. These are several of the uses I would like to incorporate into my program, which ties in nicely with the science and health aspects that the surrounding environs contribute. Lastly, I found it refreshing to hear Ito mention that he changed part of his concept after seeing the building under construction and realizing how integral steel and iron were to his design.

In reading the Perrault excerpt, I felt more vindicated in my choice of site. I think many of us, especially on the new wave of sustainable design, feel that we need to ameliorate our design with the surrounding landscape, sometimes at the expense of the overall concept. I like Perrault's choice of "violent" as a description of architecture. I think in my current site I need to embrace the challenge of the traffic congestion and difficult pedestrian access in light of the fact that this site, for me, presents unending possibilities and really rich potential to link to some other centers of human exploration and knowledge (the Science Museum and hospital).

The Library Index

The members of the informative platform(s) studio team present: the Library Index.

The material presented in this catalogue was collected and analyzed on the occasion of the studio. The pool of the selected 40 projects of this critical research is not meant to necessarily represent the most typical examples of built and unbuilt libraries of the last 150 years, but rather showcase a selective cross section of the evolutionary history of the library typology since the mid-19th century. Thus, the projects were selected for inclusion primarily on the basis of their contribution to the challenging of the typology in one way or another.

Each member of the studio researched individually five precedents, collected the visual material, outlined the main concepts and innovations, provided keywords and even “assessed” each project in more contemporary and ill-defined terms as “iconicity”. Following a series of collective presentations, redistribution of material and constant feedback between the team, a series of diagrams was produced in order to visualize comparative analyses on a series of aspects (such as scale, structure, materiality, circulation and geographic location among others) in an communicative and engaging way.

In that sense, the Library Index is a result of a purely collective effort and as such its raison d’être is not limited to that of a reference book for the design part of studio, but rather invite both designers and the public to re-imagine together the new role of the library.

The Library Index, QR code hyperlink to the full online edition.

Caption contest

Dear Library exprets,

this is your time to show your undeniable eloquence when it comes to talking libraries. Make a caption for this evocative photo a knowledge-thirsty "red army" marching through the dizzy-fying, high-techy Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City (architect: Alberto Kalach), today's Editor’s Pick on Architizer, 

You can participate with your captions here by tomorrow (Feb 18).

p.s. The Library Index is baking... compiling the last pieces left out. 

Library Science

In response to Laura's post, I agree that learning more about what Library Science is and what Librarians learn in school would help a lot with programming. I know from working with people who are going through the Simmons program currently and in the recent past the course work is moving to a lot of online media posting through Wiki's and many libraries are now using Flickr pages to show new books and link visually to books in their collection as well as show some works in their collection digitally online. Our library here at the BAC has a wiki page for staff as well as a flickr page which links from the catalog as well as our own digital image database. These are just a few ways Libraries are transforming their practices to adapt to new technologies.

Here is an article about the digital art display of library statistics at the Seattle Library. (http://www.spl.org/default.asp?pageID=about_news_detail&cid=1126554289343 ) I agree with the following quote; "People tend to gaze at it for minutes at a time," Hoetzlein said. "They seem to be mesmerized. Some people are really excited that it's real data." When I visited there was a group of people just watching the data change on screen. I am pretty certain that library statistics have ever been exciting before this installation.

Credibility of Information

In reading all these posts and trying to get a better understanding of the role of libraries today and in the future I keep thinking about the credibility of the information source. Take for example the WolframAlpha Computational Knowlege Engine (http://www.wolframalpha.com/). I'm sure you've all seen it and used it with astonishing results. While intriguing, it's actually a little scary for me. It makes me wonder how the system works and how tools like this are reflective of the way we will mine for quick answers to complex questions in the age of wikis and search engines.

 

This comes at the last minute, but I wanted to post a draft of the title page for your review.  I kept it fairly simple (our studio information and contact data are listed on the back cover).  Please let me know if you have any suggestions.

Library Science

Hi everyone,

Building off Matthew's post from earlier, I thought it would be beneficial to look up what a library science degree actually entails. I know Simmons College here in Boston has an excellent program, which they call the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. You can follow the link here: http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/about/index.php. Its extremely useful to see what this entails and how this could shape our programs going ahead. I recommend reading their mission statement, student goals, and the Dean's message, which actually focuses on how legal statutes are effecting library information and personal rights.

I was especially interested in how they broach the topic of technology and changing information, since their program must have to evolve on a pretty rapid basis to prepare their students. As you can imagine, there are a lot of buzzwords included, such as "accessibility," and "innovation," but they also talk distinctly about the interrelation of information and knowledge, which are words I use pretty interchangeably (at least in this case). They also discuss information management, which I thought was interesting and makes sense with all the varied sources and ways of gathering information out there. Anyway, I plan on doing more research, but I definitely think perusing this could help us nail down preliminary programs and ideas of what we want to focus on in our library design.

The Reader-User-Patron Variants

Variations of the 5 Laws of Library Science, 1931-2008

The future of libraries is undefined and therefore the potential to reinterpret them is virtually unlimited.  I found it interesting that even within the field of library science since 1931, there has been a stated acknowledgement that books, readers, and libraries are in fact evolving.  In 1931, Dr. Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan (1892–1972) published the 5 Laws of Library Science (listed above).  While there is no need to go into the details of each step here, it does seem useful to look at the components of his Laws: books, readers, and libraries.  These laws have been largely embraced by the library professions since their publication and have been modified as the nature of information and its means of delivery have changed.  Later variations (also listed above) show how our perspectives regarding books and readers have changed---they have morphed into media/information and patrons.  Notably, the third component has remained a physical library despite a brief flirtation with its virtual alternative, the Web.

Ramamrita’s ideas on data delivery, storage, and access are interesting and have become fairly orthodox ways of thinking within the field of information science (partially due to the fact that his framework is open-ended and upgradeable within a changing data landscape).  They may provide and interesting point of departure for our discussions about the library’s program and physical form.