Anachronistic Library, 2014
AN ANACHRONISTIC REQUEST FOR THE LECHMERE LIBRARY
Recently, futurologist Bruce Sterling offered “atemporality” to contemporary designers. Philosopher of Science Bruno Latour wrote a new manifesto for Constructivism. Each in their own way proposed that an older version of temporality, predicated on an unproblematic idea of progress, was waning.
The issue is not that time has stopped ticking, or even moving forward, but that our modernist ideas of progress and even our postmodernist ways of critiquing those seem reptilian and moralizing in light of our contemporary understanding of the interconnectedness of all things. They have both, in different ways, begun to characterize the world that we collectively or individually sense as ours - the world of anachronistic relationships - as one in which no idealized destination is reachable. Or at least, the cost of progress is understood to be such that it (progress, above all else) does not seem as desirable as it might have seemed in the 1930s.
The request is to get to set a new set of libraries on top of the new Lechmere station. Anachronism is only part of it. The other important component of relies on your ability to discern the nexus between historically specific pressures for an architectural resolution. Take the precedent (1920 Stockholm Library), and after distilling its core organizational and tectonic ideas, radicalize it and adapt, edit, reduce, enlarge, cut-up (as the American writer William Burroughs might say) and place it intelligently on the new Lechmere site. The transportation node will need to continue working, and it will require lighting and ground passages.
THE DESIGN RESPONSE
Knowledge will be released from the restraint of books as technology develops to de-materialize the information. A library, a place to store books, will transform into a place to store information, in varies forms and provide multiple ways for access.