THE LIBRARY OF THE FUTURE?

THE LIBRARY OF THE FUTURE?

BY PETER ANDERSON and MARK ANDERSON
Anderson Anderson Architects

All over the world governments, institutions and citizens are having to rethink the role of library buildings in this age of information. The traditional role of the library as a place to store and read books no longer covers the larger responsibility of libraries to collect and make available to users a range of information currently published, recorded and produced in diverse new media.

Both technology and fundamental concepts about the purpose of published information are undergoing revolutionary change, and there is growing recognition that library buildings must change as well. Functional changes in technology within the library can facilitate collection and access to new media.

An even more difficult question deals with shifts in the symbolic and functional role for libraries as a defining cultural institution in a modern city.

Libraries have always served an important symbolic function as centers of knowledge. The solid, storehouse-like structures of the past have presented an image of conservation and preservation of the physical artifacts of knowledge.

But in the information age, knowledge can also take immaterial forms, and the storage of unique examples of physical artifacts such as books and maps is reduced in importance relative to the creation of access to new forms of non-physical information. The interface between user and knowledge comes not with access to the stacks full of books, but through a variety of tools which translate digital information into visible or audible forms, either at the library itself or, more commonly, by remote access.

To represent a renewed and expanded importance in contemporary culture, library buildings must take on new forms and new public functions.

This photo shows a model of the Anderson Anderson proposal for the new Kansai Science City Library.
Recently the National Diet Library in Japan -- an institution similar to the U.S. Library of Congress -- held an open architectural design competition to initiate planning for a new building to house science and technology collections. This new building is to be built in Kansai Science City, an entirely new city under construction between Osaka and Kyoto dedicated as a concentrated international center for advanced scientific research.

Thousands of architects from all over the world submitted design proposals this August.

The Seattle firm Anderson Anderson Architecture submitted a design proposal dealing with both the functional aspects of a technologically advanced scientific library and with the cultural symbolism such a building offers in a rapidly advancing world.

The library, which was recognized in the "unbuilt" category of the recent AIA Seattle annual awards program, would be built entirely of glass -- walls, floors and ceiling -- hung within a minimal steel framework and suspended above a reflective pond of water. The designers proposed using currently available glass products that protect people and published materials deep within the multiple transparent screens.

The relationship between the design proposal and building materials reaches further into the future. According to the text accompanying the proposal: "These glass screens also employ new technology that registers as translucent shadows the invisible electric charges and radiation waves that form a dense cloud of coded information flowing continually through our atmosphere. The simple glass and steel structure of the building is intended to capture, merge with and visually dissolve into the complex cloud of information surrounding our bodies and filling our minds."

We were joined on the design team by Megumi Tamanaha and Masatoshi Kasai and designed the building as a simple machine continually registering, recording, and condensing the ebb and flow of complex information washing across the project site.

As an international center for the collection and ordering of humanity's continually transforming knowledge of the natural universe, the library is conceived as "a collector apparatus deployed at an essentially arbitrary point within the dense cloud of ambient knowledge and raw information flowing equally through both the natural universe and the intellectual space of human culture.

"The library makes physical this space of flowing information as an inhabitable material presence in human life, rather than as an intellectualized virtual reality, physically disconnected from the sensual experience of nature . . . The library is no longer a quiet storehouse of past considerations, but a powerful turbine reeling in acquired knowledge."

Peter Anderson and Mark Anderson are principals in the Seattle design firm, Anderson Anderson Architecture.

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