[Untitled]

Phan, Jennifer Tu-Anh

Tandon, Antariksh

Brooklyn, NY, USA

2014

005-LF-P045

Professional

Since their inception, libraries and athenaeums have had a dual function - that of collection and dissemination (preserving and enabling). The importance of these roles has fluctuated over time, as has content. The destined mutability of our learning devices and artifacts brings us to question the true and lasting purpose of libraries and athenaeums in our society. Permanence, we ought to believe, lies in the shear significance of the “place” that the athenaeum creates in the city, with the memory it carries in its walls.

While most libraries today address both of these functions through a model of mass distribution and consumption, the athenaeum is curated and its content is highly significant, bordering the function that of a museum. It needs to display treasures as a museum does, protect them as an archive does, but have people interact with them in the intimate way that a library allows.

In our proposal, content is form and content is structure.
Like studiolos or cabinets de curiosités, we see the architecture as becoming one with the treasures it contains; the rooms are defined by the memory carried in the walls surrounding them, whether this memory be physical, experiential, digital or a yet to be -ial.

As above, so below. As before, so again. What remains is place and memory.

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