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.