READ. MEET. WORK. | Interior – Skin – Context

Site Context

Taking a base of Ahmedabad, we try to connect the dots to create the perfect space adaptable for users to divulge. Taking inspiration from the Book Mountain, designed by the firm MVRDV, adapting the peripheral circulation to keep the books or the main activity surrounding the smaller ones. The site being by river Sabarmati (Ahmedabad), provides narration of the Growth in the city. The site offers a great connection with the architectural masterpieces Tagore Hall, Sanskar Kendra and NID, which guides a modernistic approach to the curation of the site and its development.

The space reconnects the library to citizen’s daily life; on an architectural scale, it serves as a big window linking the interior to the exterior, showing the activities in the library to the city and also taking in the surrounding landscape. The library’s interior welcomes the people not only for the books but also allows them to cultivate the space to occupy it with workshops and activities which bring them closer to books.

Design Process

The methodology for the same will be transformative, allowing planes to rotate and shift, keeping their foci in the process, and modulating the elements of the layout/structure to bring up the architectural domain to form a self-expressive space.

A “logical formula,” a step-by-step procedural model, was established. The basic elements such as line, plane, and volume were set into motion, resulting in an object that appeared to “design itself.” Whether the result would be architecture or have architectural features such as a plan or façade was not a consideration of the process or a criterion for evaluation. In this sense, the problem was not to design an object but to search for and establish a transformational program free from traditional authorial constraints. [Peter Eisenmann for house IV]

He is interested in exploring architecture’s inherent nature, divorced from the program’s specificity. The nature of plane, line or column, and volume is of primary concern, as is the relationship among these elements. This relationship is organized by a rule system, which Eisenman, to borrow an analogy from linguistic theory, has called “Deep Structure.” To inculcate the same, Piet Mondrian’s Grid was taken as an inspiration. The constructive parameters of the grid are incorporated to transform the 2-dimensional composition into a 3-dimensional inhabitable composition to create a wholistic space.

Final Outcome

The library contains regions for centered work and assembly spaces committed to presentations, gatherings, and talks, with the focal point of each space communicated in the selection of materials and finishes. The primary social gathering spaces of the ground floor include a straightforward substantial design and a stone floor. Interestingly, the upper floors will be built utilizing wood, decreasing the structure’s carbon impression and giving an acoustically reasonable investigation climate.

The main space/activity, which is the library, will be inviting with the way it sits in the context and also by the use of materials, colors, and lighting design, which in turn helps to focus more on the activity than the space. The program of the library not only includes a book reading space and a book collection, bookbinding, paper making, and spaces for seminars and workshops to happen, which in turn allows users to interact with the other users and the architecture too. 

The willingness of the library and the future aspects of the space make it believable for it to grow into a more socialized proposition. This building will not only come out as a shell but also as a safe place to activate the conditions of the neighborhood.

[This Academic Project has been published with text submitted by the student]