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.

A library in 2020, interacts with the new Lechemere station sits quietly next to the railtracks. As the succeeding library of the Stockholm Library by Asplund, The xx Library provide real experience of different forms of information beyond the limit of text, and acts as a symbol of the future.

The Material Libriry and the Odour Library offer unusual experiences to touch and smell information described by text before.

The Visual & Audio Library offers an saturated experience for accessing information through realistic hogographic motion pictures or purely audio space underground. Functional and Comfortable, this library maximize the sense of the readers through technology.

The Text Library, though seems unnecessary any more, offers a way to experience the reading environment of the past. Readers bored by the moving pictures and unrestful sound can happily experience the quiteness of pre-technology era will nostalgia.

The Plaza Library, one highly interacting with the train station, offers open areas with small independent access points for the need of the high flow traffic, as well as several relatively quite open sitting nearby. The Private Library, distributed near different libraries in the site, offers solutions to meet the need of individuals or small groups.