The Box, the Vault, and the Cone

The Box, the Vault, and the Cone

Thenhaus, Clark

Ann Arbor, MI, USA

2014

005-LF-P041

Endemic/Michigan

Professional

Perhaps no other typology should be less concerned with the question ‘what will it be in xxx years’ than the athenaeum. Yet, perhaps no other typology should be more concerned. Both reliquary / library, museum / archive, and a historic / projective project, the Athenaeum is a classic contradiction. However, speculations on the future of technology or the library miss the point. The inherent contradictions of an athenaeum are fodder for resistance to such conjecture without relinquishing an instrumental cultural status. The future of the Athenaeum is not bound up in the status of libraries or technology. Rather, it is an archetype that resists such architecturally antagonistic statements. Instead, the Athenaeum is a protagonist of architecture’s capacity to curate new social collectives as a disciplinary construct, developed here through anachronistic, elemental architectural geometries of a box, cone, and vault in novel arrangement. The future of the Athenaeum is architecture itself.

This proposal combines fundamental architectural elements in ways that are historically referential yet projective in nature. Here, the Athenaeum is an arrangement of primitive forms; the box, the barrel vault, and the cone. The box is its normal robust container, carved out by intersecting barrel vaults to produce an expanded public ground plane. Interior cones within the box serve as vertical light well aggregations and objects that structure programmatic shifts, thresholds, rooms, and spatial interruptions as elements between within the box mass constituting an interior figure. The facade consists of layers of red brick and white marble, traditional to many buildings considered to be the pride and ornament of Philadelphia as well as the original facade proposals for the current Athenaeum.

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