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Christian added company LAR Fernando Romero
2 years ago

Christian added this project

This proposal for the Deichmanske Library and its attached mixed-use building is a bold yet sensitive response to Oslo’s vision for an urban masthead in the Bjorvika district along the harbor. Beginning with a complex and dynamic urban site, this project absorbs and channels all of its latent energies and begins to dissect and expose the visual and urban potentials that arise from architectural manipulations.

This vigorous folded form attempts to surmount two seemingly opposite agendas: the ability of a building to both maximize its footprint and allow programmatic diversity while preserving suspended void spaces and expanding the urban fabric. This building achieves both with its bulky massing and faceted skin sitting atop transparent footings that tip-toe across the plaza below.

Hollowed-out light wells and snaking ramps constitute three major sections of the building and extend an attenuated promenade from the city up into the belly of the building. This promenade then spills inward and upward producing novel and mixed program, maximizing the unexpected experiences available to visitors. As the visitors move vertically and out towards the skin of the building, the building achieves maximalism- an overproduction of surface as support for program (an urban terrace), solar performance, and extravagant views.

The Library anchors the building, not only by making crucial connections to its urban context, but as a retooling of its architectural and programmatic ambitions. This design seeks to address the contemporary importance of the Library and its institutional status.

As an architectural machine, the library can no longer remain sanctified and apart. The library must be thrust out into the public and commercial sphere, generating new connections, allegiances, and capturing new users. There is no longer a simple and transparent public square. In this proposal, the library performs public space through the replication of complexity, spatial modulation, and media dispersal. By catering to richer social interactions, multiple user identities, and knowledge exchange, the library can find new spatial and programmatic typologies to offer the city.

The distribution of allied program across floor plates allows contiguous programming and flexibility across larger footprints. Mechanized and exposed book distribution systems snake and interweave open plans, expressing the ambition of flexibility and customization. Surface areas become actively charged as media platforms and digital archives are available through graphic user interface and mobile device access. By enriching Cartesian space with geometrical complexity, virtual depth, and digital transference

2 years ago

Christian added company HAV Eiendom AS
2 years ago