Performative Architectural Territories – Redefining Library in the Techno-social Landscape
In this international collaboration project, we worked with 3rd year Architecture students from the school of Design at the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering of the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Together, we challenged to design a library and its programme of services which will be built in a designated site in Brisbane.
Design Concept
The library acts as a kind of centralised decision making platform that facilitates networks who wish to use the public space of the HSW for their own agenda. In effect the library is contacted by a network and the site borrowed. How the role of the library differs from that of say a council is that the site is a space committed to the programme of the library and its traditional function of providing services for free. The following are some scripts that can trigger possibilities on the site or performative actualisations.
The rational of the library is to recognise the interplay between humans, their networks and the role technology can play in facilitating human to human contact and the sharing of knowledge. The library seeks to exploit these networks and to link its members into a space / time programme, a type of network sleeve. The HSW site serves as a platform for the library, a surface on which are inscribed various ‘unstable’ and flexible programmes given the diversity, multiplicity and complexity of these human networks.
Interaction Model
Research Findings and Insights
Although better technology allows us to become more independent in many ways, the sharing of the physical and human to human experience remains innate. By providing an environment and upon it architectures that engage with surrounding territories and inherently activate and attract people, architecture and technology serve to partner each other in delivering a space whose performance may be enhanced.
Informing the design strategy and concept proposal is clear data which shows the site is highly prone to the impacts of the flooding of the Brisbane River .This project proposal embraces the inevitability of the impact this flooding may have on the site and organises and accommodates space accordingly. Thus the library seeks not to be obsessed with objects per se but with movement, be it people, informa- tion, or water. Resilience is the key word here, both in terms of the formal elements inscribed onto the site and the resilience of any networks passing through the sleeve of the library.
