Hybrid Collision —
community library
AUD412: Building Design Studio
Instructor: Gabriel Fries-Briggs
Duration: 5 weeks
community library
The 21st century public library is no longer one focused on the storage of countless stacks. It has become a common space for the public realm that exemplifies access to larger bodies of knowledge and encourages exploration, creation, and collaboration between individuals. It encompasses the main collections and seating that most libraries do, but goes further to add large group study rooms, a tech
center and fabrication lab, expansive auditorium, and community center.
UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
Winter 2019
Silver Lake Library is designed following a hybrid structural system that utilizes the stability and elasticity of the folded plate and rigidity of a ‘ready-made’ steel beam-and-truss to create a form that extends from a large, open space into interstitial nodes. The large space also acts as a shell for a structurally independent second floor above. A hybrid surface and vector structural system is conceived that allows for an organization in space that contains disparities in rhythm and adjacency.
More specifically, the massing is about specific moments of intersection and the resulting structural and organizational consequences. The folded plate structural system is utilized as both a roof and wall device for a larger space that contains the main collections and seating. These folded plate walls are intersected by platonic ‘ready-mades’ that follow a more mundane I-beam structural logic. The notion and directionality of these five intersections are accentuated through a direct manipulation of the folded plate wall surfaces, formally highlighting a reaction to the pressure of the adjacent structural system. In order to bind together tworadically different structural systems, varying three-dimensional trusses are placed atintersection points that become integral features in the interior spaces, framing the important programmatic functions that exist within the periphery ‘ready-mades.’
As a whole, disparities in the library’s massing and the intriguing hybridity of structure juxtaposes the extensibility of folded plate and firmness of beam-and-truss, while also extending the space into the public realm/site through an embedding of built and unbuilt form.
- Artin Sahakian -