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public library - copely square, boston
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Copely
Square is located in the heart of Boston’s historic Back
Bay. It is surrounded by the iconic triumvirate of Boston: Trinity
Church by H.H. Richardson, the Boston Public Library by McKim,
Mead and White, and the Hancock Tower by Pei, Cobb and Freed.
The site demanded a dense openness. Information is the foundation
of democracy. The ability for individual access is an inalienable
right. The public library is a container of information. New technologies
have reinvented methods of conveying information. The systems
meet at the interface between man and idea. A transparent bar
defines the edge of the plaza, restoring the urban boundary and
mimicking the face of the existing library. The tendrils occupy
the space of the Square, but simultaneously leave it open. The
organic forms embrace the site by juxtaposing it with its uniqueness.
Transparency and opacity open and close the site. The geometric
bleeds into the organic smearing the urban edge into the vacuity
of the site. The stack system becomes the structure and form of
the building, defined by efficiency of storage and the proportion
of man. The building provides interlocking fingers of digital
and manual reading rooms. The tendrils penetrate and attach to
the cage. The cage bulges to enter the tendrils. The assisted
interface reacts to accessed information. Breathing with time
and knowledge, the assisted interface physically adjusts to the
viewer and his perception. The reading room is the access wall
between the tangible stacks and the digital tendrils. The building,
formed of information, breaks free from the rigidity of the urban
plan by corrupting it from within. The stack cage holds the urban
face of the street linking to the traditional urbanism of Boston.
The back side of the cage, opening onto the plaza, explodes with
the vibrance of the tendril’s organic form. The space of
the plaza is openly filled. |
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