Program: 3,100 sqm Public Library
Location: Daegu, South Korea
Client: : Daegu Metropolitan City Suseong-gu Office

Year: 2012

Status: Competition Entry

Our proposal for the Daegu Gosan Public Library challenges the conventional understanding of the spatial and social experience of a public library as a series of discrete reading rooms with defined thresholds and cluttered stacks. We propose an intelligent, open, and integrated library experience which supersedes the media storage methods of the past and changes the library space into a hybrid environment through ubiquitous information resources, integrated furnishings and active communal social spaces. The architecture is designed to enable and embody the spirit of open-source exchange and collective knowledge through free-form geometries, open plans and integrated amenities. We have minimized the thresholds between spaces, floors, and functions to consider the library as an active, continuous, and fluid field of social, cultural, and intellectual discourse. Contrary to the convention of defining the building program as a composition of platonic spaces with controlled adjacencies, we have approached it as a varied and constant programmatic gradient which allows programs and uses to bleed into one another, thus facilitating constant physical, visual, and social exchange.

Conceptually and literally, the ground field of the site swells, peels, and multiplies vertically as a continuation of the adjacent park and urban fabric. This constant sectional change is articulated as a smooth vertical gradient which merges floors, ramps, stairs, terraces and furnishings into an inhabitable and ergonomic landscape culminating in an open-air roof-scape lounge and terrace overlooking the city of Daegu.  The boundaries between floors are blurred, as the continuously walk-able surface which unifies the many spaces of the library facilitates circulatory, physical and visual connections both internally within the network of spaces and externally with the surrounding context.  Circulation through the library is coupled with the various programs and generates a fluid transition between different environments allowing users to freely browse the books on display while simultaneously being able to sit and use their laptops, tablets, and smart phones on the ubiquitously distributed Wi-Fi network, or locally transmitted blue-tooth hot spots.