‘The aim of the project was to create a space with an interconnected play of its inside and outside, where functional and private spaces are in an interwoven relation to the open public areas.’
Through progress and evolution of information technology and with it an alteration of consumer behaviour, physical bookstores were pushed to marginality. But how is it possible that with the decreasing importance of books and bookstores, the construction of new and the renovating old libraries are booming? What are the reasons that the importance of libraries as cultural institutions are on a rise?
Through civil liberty, the access to information and knowledge was democratised step by step. The older the existence of libraries got, the more information became available.
First, just accessable to scholars, then civil society, the middle class, right up to labor and children. In the last decades, the digital age, the democracy of inforamtion increased and getting to knowledge and wisdom became easier and faster.
In future, analog and digital media will go hand in hand of accessing information and will be a main task of libraries and its architecture – the library as a hybrid! Printed and E-books will exist next – and with each other.
Physical books and the maintenance or those, archiving knowledge for future generateion and open, public access will the area of field of duties further on. Furthermore the importance of ‘e-terms’ are on the rise :
e-library, e-books, e-learning or e-publishing. Adding to that, libraries need to ease the way for borrowing digital books, music, or films and provide a virtuality with individual support. The challenge and responsibility for architecture will be to create a space which serves reality and virtuality at the time and all the changes the two are bringing with them.
Hence digital media operate on a global level, the digital information become the main source as the connector to worldwide knowledge and research, whereelse at the same time physical libraries has to serve more on a communal level to connect, inform and entertain citizens.
The library as an architectural type was always a facility that connects. Isolated from its surrounding, the main task of a library was to enable its visitors access to knowledge and therefor to connect them to the world.
Since liberating the access to technology by new technology, the library mutates from being isolated from its urban grid to becoming a place for citizens to meet, get informed and get entertained.
Social learning theory points out that the keeping of knowledge can improve through repeating and reflecting in a natural and familiar environment. The library 2.0 therefore needs to be a connecting element to nature. Either the library integrates in nature, or nature becomes a main design-element in libraries. Nature as an element of inspiration.