Advisor: Yu Wang

C O L L A B O R A T O R - QIYING RUAN

Role - Led concept and design generation, completed major model building and detail additions, created rendering illustrations and all analysis drawings.

Toolkits - Rhino, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator

Year 2020

Today's world is more closely connected than ever before. In addition to physical books, the acquisition of knowledge is also obtained through digital media and other means. Under the background of informatization, the emergence of e-books makes people less and less go to bookstores or libraries. As a result, more people have access to knowledge. The library has become a place where everyone can learn, and it encourages people to learn independently.

The physical book is a medium for people to realize self-learning. The book is rich in content, including history, novels, art and science. After nearly 650 years (from movable type printing), physical books are no longer the only source of knowledge. In the digital age, we can obtain information and knowledge through an e-learning platform and solve problems in just a few clicks. However, at present, libraries based on physical books still have a place in the city.

In 2002, Google proposed to scan and store more than 25 million books from various top universities. While causing intense discussions in the academic and publishing circles, it also had a big impact on traditional libraries. In addition to the functions of the traditional library facing the public or students for borrowing books and reading, they also have the function of storing these important intellectual property.

But over time, the library's functions may be redefined for a completely different learning experience. With the digitization and the accessibility of the Internet, people's learning patterns have changed, but the spatial form of acquiring knowledge has not been updated.

A more realistic issue is, to what extend and in what way, do we need a 'library building'. The network of public books in some first tier cities is already very complete. To the most of people, there is no need to get anything from libraries. The ideal world for urban citizens is already achieved by mobile app and computer software. They already get used to live and work in various sizes of screens, and embrace the universe of digital media which assimilates more easily and is more comprehensive and considerate than the world of paper media.

Therefore, we have to confess that people no longer need to travel to a specific library to acquire knowledge. In this era which is full of Twitter, blog, P2P, C2C, C2O, O2C, the library with paper media is declining and eventual to death. Knowledge is fragmented out from books, and fit people’s needs with high definition. The library is losing its dignity.

At this point, the whole 'illness' can be reduced to a sentence-the library, a building type that is completely about 'knowledge, information', is now unconsciously maginalized in the overall lineage of public knowledge production, dissemination, consumption, fragmentation, and re-consumption.

Under such circumstances, a more emergent preposition is to redefine the idea of “library” in the era of new media rather than to design a new library building. McLuhan quoted Edgar Allan Poe's 'Sailor's Self-Saving' analogy in Understanding Media: Sailors are caught in the vortex of the sea. The only way to save themselves is to calmly observe the vortex's dynamics and then follow the trend. In the same way, we do not intend to confront positively with the media environment of mixed capital strengths. The bigger attempt is to 'reveal and criticize'.

Now that we set the tone of our project with a critical nature. On the basis of our theoretical research, we are now composing our manifesto: The library building, which has got rid of the identity of a pure container for printed media, will return to the core of the city with the attitude of a knowledge-reactive collision.

Moments of the Reactor©Sheng Fang

-The Making of Dystopia

Our design is influenced by typology, trying to stack different types together, each clear type is a modernism, a very simple modernist thinking. This produces a strange state of modernism combined. Each relatively independent type is interpreting a life. And these are actually the considerations of 'multiple juxtaposition, different values'. We accept different real images of behavior, and try to propose a new typology of multiple imaginations, which can pay tribute to history, to avant-garde enduring experiments, to programs, and even to modernism. It can be said that it is an anti-textual, anomalous, declarative design that faces reality and faces the future.

Chapter 1: Brief and Concept for the Project.

- defines notions such as

(1)Dystopian Warfare and (2)Reality Anxiety;

- presents the design aims and objectives;

- displays early conceptual design studies;

- puts forward the main characteristics

that have been followed throughout the

development of both the project and this report:

(1)Disorder-ize, (2)Provocation and (3)Manifesto;

Chapter 2: Site Analysis, Planning, Form and Systems.

Section 1.

Section 1 refers to site analysis providing specific infomation about the basis and several means that have been used to renovate the site.

Chapter 2: Site Analysis, Planning, Form and Systems.

Section 2.

Section 2 refers to technical drawings and arrangment of the project.

Section 2 includes drawings on different scales. Each drawing has had its own mission and has had a fundamental impact on the development of the current project

Chapter 3: Architectural Details.

-Chapter 3 presents specific information about the details of the Reactor. This refers to structures, space arrangement, materials, techniques or ways of putting together, along with construction sequences of different components.

Chapter 4: Building Performance.

-Chapter 4 addresses specific knowledge about the building performance of the Dystopian Reactor of Information. Including information on information collision system, which is the core of the Reactor, this chapter also includes notions referring to green system of the project

Exit & Insect

-It is necessary to reorganize language in order to figure out the relationship between Provocation and Manifesto:

This design is based on the dystopian space constructed in the irony provocation of the current state of the library building and the friendly atmosphere abnormally staying in the space to show our thinking and anxiety about the building type of 'library'. Then on this basis, we tried to imagine the nature transformation of the library in the future. On the one hand, the design used the existing library for spatial type extraction and reorganization to create an abnormally disordered space, in this way to provoke and declare war on the status of the library as a public building.

On the other hand, we tried to build an affinity space with information exchange and collision as the core host, so that the library can transform from the original pure print media container identity to a fluid platform for information expression and exchange, that is, a reactor where knowledge interacts and collides. This echoes our Manifesto. The large space of external disorder and dystopia shows the provocation and attack on the status quo of contemporary libraries. The internal information reactor built with knowledge interaction as the core concept serves as a new core of the library. The shaping of this ideal paradigm will serve as a strong and extreme force, attempting to impact the public's mindset, and thus arousing deeper group thinking.

Gilles Deleuze commented that Gregor (character in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”) finally turned into an insect, whose cause is the character eventually seek a “exit” under the big pressure of the family and society, Similarly, we do not believe that this concept design competition of the library could solve any practical problems, and also it should not be the goal of any design work, all creative design and artistic works, always able to reveal or provide a Secret “exit” to the audience. Then we won’t need to secretly change into an “insect” if we are lucky enough.

Epilogue

-Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together, to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking... Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

—— Stephen Hawking , 1993