MBTA and the library

i was at the BPL recently and took some photos of the Copley T-Stop for those of you using the Parcel 13 site. its a little inspiration for your projects as you think of how to incorporate the existing/closed T-Stop into your designs.

Collage Review

Thank all of you for your comments last studio.  You gave me some great ideas (“great” as in, “Great, that’s just more to think about!”).  But seriously, I appreciate the feedback and am excited by everyone’s projects.  Since Evangelos mentioned that we should post our work each week, I thought I would post my collages.  I hope to build on these main concepts, but since we are focusing this week on structure, I will have to let these ideas percolate.  I would like to use this as a chance to record a few concepts that inform my atmospheric collages: 

Search & Display:  The future of information holds new ways on not only collecting data, but displaying it as well.  A future library will need space to display data, real time, as it is collected and produced.  Imagine downloading a group of statistics on a research subject; the future library could not only display that information, but allow you to manipulate it, sort it, and/or edit it without a keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen.  This will require a new kind type of library space.

Interactive “Floor-Light”: This feature is site-specific, considering the building’s proposed situation over a major sub-surface roadway.  The inverse of the “skylight”, the floor-light opens a window to an urban reality, while gathering the trace light and reflections (and noises) of an urban element which typically belongs “outside” of the building.  In addition, this glazed surface can be augmented with an interactive display which shows useful data (route-finding, entertainment, query services). 

Street Book Wall:  The street-oriented book wall is a strategy which speaks to a need to increase access to public information.  By turning the library inside-out, the print collection is literally made public, a gesture which makes this new library a progressive alternative to tradition (consider the opaque and introverted condition of the Boston Public Library).  Transporting “book sushi,” the book wall moves its cargo at the pace of the pedestrian, bringing the book back to the street.

Self-Organizing Corral:  With new RFID technology and personal mobile devices, the need for antiquated cataloging and sorting systems is being replaced with decentralized, efficient book tracking methods.  The self-organizing corrals are organisms with the program which collect people and books who, theoretically, sort themselves over time.  In others words, when technology allows the book to live anywhere, the users themselves will organize the collection.  The corrals, based on the types of books they have collected, will reveal how our culture intuitively sorts media.

Open Screening Room:  The library must remain a social node in the community, and as our tastes for information delivery evolve, so does our need to share in its consumption.  The screening room represents public information on a large scale and , as it turns out, is a traditional role of the library.  Along with the screening room (which is itself a borderless area within the library), other diverse program elements can be included, e.g.: a bowling lane, a bike path, a moving sidewalk, or a basketball court.  (Thanks to you studio geniuses for those great ideas!)

solar exposure studies

i did new solar exposure studies with the time/dates that EK suggested, and found that the exposure is better then i thought. these studies effect the street level public space and will not have an impact on the upper level rooftop deck where i have imagined the seasonal public market to be.
p.s. i did not mean for them to look like loteria cards, but i sort of love that they do!

Potential Form

Here it is. My first movie. I think I might do a romcom next.

Video and Copyright

In the interest of designing a digital library to try to resolve the conflict between multimedia and credible information, I couldn't help but get hung up on the fact that the Cambridge library circulates DVDs of new releases, etc much like a Blockbuster store. I realize it's a "browsing" library but I couldn't get passed the idea of a library as a video rental store. Anyway, in milling around looking for info regarding DVDs and libraries, I found some guidelines on the ALA site. It's really not very exciting but the issues with use and copyrights is kind of interesting...

http://www.ala.org/ala/professionalresources/libfactsheets/alalibraryfactsheet07.cfm

15 Dazzling Library Designs

I also found this recently: http://weburbanist.com/2008/12/10/clever-creative-modern-library-architecture-designs/.

Good inspiration for cool library designs, including many of our precedents and the JFK Presidential library at Columbia Point here in Boston.

Library Types

Hi Everyone,

After our tour yesterday I have been thinking more about what type of library I want to create. Although I think mine will inevitably be a hybrid of different kinds (such as a medical and scientific library with some interactive elements, like a museum, thrown in), it was interesting to do some research on more "official" types of libraries. Like most of you, I have heard of different types but never given it much thought, especially in the public realm- research vs. browsing, etc.

So I looked around and found one of the most comprehensive lists on Wikipedia (sorry, but useful): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Types_of_libraries. The list is pretty exhaustive and the bibliographic links are very helpful. I also found the ALA, American Library Association, which I'm sure some of you are aware of but I am just finding. I recommend checking out their entire site; I'm sure it can be useful for all of us, no matter what direction we're going in, but they, too, have a list of different types: http://www.ala.org/ala/educationcareers/careers/librarycareerssite/typesoflibraries.cfm.
Note that its in reference to library careers, which (predictably) are facing major cutbacks in this digital age. Hope that's helpful!

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).