Overview  

 

 

The studio aims to examine received ideas—that is, formerly novel ideas which, due to recurrent use, have been depleted of their original intensity—in contemporary architecture culture. It proposes to disclose, define, and date—and in the long run archive—received ideas prevalent over the past decade, both in the professional and academic realms, in order to ultimately open up otherwise precluded possibilities for architectural design and architectural theory. To that end, it focuses on design operations and conceptual strategies, particularly in terms of the means of representation and the lexicon through which they are respectively articulated.

 

While the studio delves into the question of what eventually is a unique idea by looking through all of the ancestors of our education it also finds out ways to address the problem of a specific design-quest which in our case was the library. The concept comes after the rules of the game, meaning the cliche ideas. Our idea of a New York library is mainly doubting the need for another library and instead is exploring the idea of a reading room as it was a part of a state program around 1935. It was when the New York Public Library opened the ‘Open Air Library’ to give these out-of-work businessmen and intellectuals a place to go where they did not need money, a valid address, a library card, or any identification to enjoy the reading materials. In the same atmosphere, in the Bryan Park reading room we wanted to explore the idea of a space that is public but carries a certain privavy due to the fact that is domestically equipped by providing to the readers more than bookshelves,

a personal storage. This storage and its updates are going to be our Library’s mobile archive.