Unit 10 has considered what a contemporary public library is for, how they work internally and as part of the wider city and what meaningful, productive, beautiful architecture we can derive from their idealistic beginnings.
We were based in Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone, one of the UKs largest regeneration projects. The current light industrial landscape is bounded and cut through by large-scale infrastructure with unusual edge conditions and utilitarian historical adjacencies. We looked at this context - physical and cultural, existing and proposed - with wilful curiosity, considering how the current ‘vision’ for the area could be developed into a working piece of city at ground level, first through a small-scale intervention and then with the placement of a public library in an area to be dominated by private uses.
We looked carefully at precedent, both in person and from architectural canon, drawing, modelling and writing short descriptions of the experience of dwelling in libraries. The final proposals responded to a curated pattern book with each student developing their own personal views on what a public library for Bristol Temple Meads could and should give to its residents, working from the scale of a single seat or table within to its civic presence in the wider Bristol area.