A library for the Adventurous Reader
As someone who reads and has difficulty finding spaces to store her books in an aesthetically pleasing manner, a library as a concept is an enticing one. It is often the response I give to people who ask me what I plan on doing with all of my books: I want to have a library one day. And now I do, or a model of one, made out of cardboard. The visual of a book turned on its side isn’t a traditional image of a book, it isn’t how book lovers want to see books treated , but it does make for a good base concept to go off of. Which is what I started with when I began brainstorming for this project. My mood board was filled with the tallest and most grand bookcases, patterns on patterns repeating, of endless tales and adventures, and I was inspired. Inspired to create a model of something that resembled this journey that a book takes you on, and was also useful in housing these very books. This can be seen in the choice to opt for a ladder instead of the
more traditional staircase, or in the choice to make it so open and in tune with nature, or even in the choice to have the library resemble giant books, which makes its visitors like little people in a giant’s world. The fact that both books and cardboard come from trees, from nature, created this harmonious connection in my head that gave the project an air of balance, and a context that I wanted to work within.
In order to build my model, I had to first build my three triangular modules. For them to be structurally sound, each of them had to be made out of a single piece of cardboard that was bent to resemble a book on its side, which required some luck, because the type of cardboard I was working with was not bending precisely where I wanted to but that worked out well. The fact that I also don’t have a full size ruler available, just two 13 cm triangle rulers made it challenging to measure exactly, but I worked with them and managed to created three modules that we're almost exactly the same. Then I had to measure the bases that act as the different levels of my library, which was also tricky since I do not have a cutter, and instead was using scissors, which made cutting long rectangles that looked sleek a challenge. But I did what I could, and cleaned the edges up after and managed to created three identical bases. From here, I glued the modules to the bases, and then glued each structure to the one above, using cardboard cylinders (from paper towels) as support columns. The rest of the details, such as the windows and the ladders were drawn on to maintain a smooth overall aesthetic. Scale and structural integrity had to be kept in mind while I carried out each of these steps.
My research for this project began with just observing images of libraries, and the way the exterior of the building had to do with the interior, with the tall bookcases that seem endless but are actually magically contained in buildings that I discovered, often, have nothing to do with what is inside of them. That was the base of my conceptualization, to have a connection between the exterior architecture and the use of the this architecture as a library: a home for books. Upon googling it, I discovered that there are libraries scattered around the world that are built to resemble books in different ways, and that there is actually a library that is supposed to be built in Dubai that is meant to resemble an open book. Which puts my design in the middle of a timeline that stretches out into the past and future, in terms of book shaped libraries. What my design brings in that is new in a world of visuals of books standing upright or open, to be read, is using the image of the book standing on its sides, which is unconventional and at first glance seems counterintuitive to the function of the book, but at a second glance, is imaginative and playful and interesting to look at and build off of.
