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OMAs Trs Grande Bibliothque (More)

May 20, 2012 by fosco lucarelli Leave a Comment

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As a companion to previous post, heres more drawings of the same iconic project.
From the description of the project:
OMA received an honorable mention for Trs Grande Bibliothque, a competition to build a new national library in France.
The program called for the creation of various smaller libraries contained in one building envelope; including libraries for
moving images, recent acquisitions, reference, catalogues and scientific research. The immense amount of information to be
stored within these spaces (books, films, digital databases) became the impetus for the overall concept design. The library is
imagined as a solid block of information, a dense repository for the past, from which voids are carved to create public
spaces absence floating in memory.

The ambition of this project is to rid architecture of responsibilities it can no longer sustain and to explore this new freedom
aggressively. It suggests that, liberated from its former obligations, architectures last function will be the creation of the
symbolic spaces that accommodate the persistent desire for collectivity.
At the moment when the electronics revolution seems about to melt all that is solid to eliminate all necessity for
concentration and physical embodiment it seems absurd to imagine the ultimate library.
But that was exactly what the French government proposed when it organized a competition for the TGB in the summer of
1998: 250,000m2 on the east side of Paris on a site near the Periphrique, facing the Seine.
Along with conference centers, restaurants, offices, etc., it would consolidate five separate and autonomous institutions in
which the complete production of words and images since 1945 the Bibliothque is as much cinema as library would be
contained: a cinemateque, a library of catalogues, and a scientific research library.
The scheme is based on technological scenarios developed with inventors, systems analysts, writers and electronics companies.
They all anticipate the utopia of fully integrated information systems to materialize before the opening of the building: books,
films, music, computers will be read on the same magic tablets. The future will not spell the end of the book but a period of
new equalities.
The Very Big Library is interpreted as a solid block of information, a repository of all forms of memory books, laser disks,
microfiche, computers and databases. In this block, the major public spaces are defined as absences of building, voids carved
out of the information solid. Floating in memory, they are multiple embryos, each with its own technological placenta.
Partner in charge:
Rem Koolhaas
Competition Team:
Art Zaaijer, Xaveer de Geyter, Georges Heintz, Heike Lohmann, Ron Steiner, Alex Wall, Christophe Cornubert, Ramon Klein,
Yushi Uehara
Engineers:

Cecil Balmond, Mohsen Zikri of Arup

Sources:
Afasia and OMA.

You may also like

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Book Review: Pamphlet

Architecture 11-20

Tagged With: Architecture, past futures, visions

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