Green Square Library and Plaza Competition
Status: Competition Proposal
Central Idea: The Future Trap
The aim is to encourage a closer relationship between social consciousness and the act of acquiring knowledge. The influence of multiple segregated specialisations is balanced with an intensified experience of everyday knowing and understanding, the commonsense glue of society, which remains highly dependent on shared experience and personal interaction.
We capture the future of the library by enveloping the whole of the space with a canopy, like a net woven from the fabric of industrial heritage cast over a diversity of destinations and functions, suspended in space and folded into the ground plane, with all parts visible. Like objects swimming in the void, discrete packets of information once segregated, are now brought together and tenuously connected within the integrated field of a networked event. The imagery is reminiscent of a giant fish trap, partially submerged, inviting passage like an old book arcade transformed into an arrival hall for the light rail, a plaza marketplace for the exchange of knowledge and ideas.
Just as the pre-colonial place was a site rich in spiritual and physical nourishment for the traditional custodians, so the library can transform this place into a new site of interactive knowing, capturing the community with enticements to a shared experience of sourcing and disseminating knowledge.
