Subterranean Archive

Unit 10 explores what a contemporary public library is for, asking how they work and what meaningful, productive, and beautiful architecture we can derive from their idealistic beginnings. Seeing that the traditional image of a library was that of an exclusive and rarely accessible place that sought to purely store books, the notion of an entirely “Public” Library that serves to make information and knowledge widely accessible to all is a relatively new prospect.

As such, in the pursuit of designing a public library we ground ourselves with questions important to the first Victorian public libraries; how can knowledge be made available to all? How can a building be public while keeping the means of this knowledge’s transmission safe and ordered? And how can this be paid for and procured within frameworks that currently exist? As such my final proposal was the natural progression of my explorations of light and shadow, culminating in a scheme that encompassed my vision of challenging perceptions of what a public library can be.

The proposal builds upon my research of underground structures with a majority of the scheme being located 1.1m below ground and being accessed via the three pavilions that have been carefully arranged across the site. The pavilions are intended to be monolithic in nature, as if to appear as ruins amidst a lush green landscape, a reference to Bristol’s industrial past. The subterranean nature of the scheme provides a comfortable environment to facilitate the storage of rare books. As our perceptions of what a public library can be, continue to change and morph, my proposal remains steadfast in its focus on exploring light and shadow. My proposal is the encapsulation of the successful use of lighting as a tool to define different atmospheres within different rooms. Whilst the skylights within the exhibition hall conjure small spots of light which carve through the darkness and create brief clusters of light amidst the darkness, the library reading space capitalises on widely spreading diffused light from the central courtyard to enable the room to achieve a more uniform and consistent, comfortable level of light.

This manipulation of light within the scheme allows for a more intimate sensory experience within the subterranean portions of the site, which I hope will encourage a new generation of individuals to enter the library and immerse themselves within Temple Mead’s deeply industrial heritage.