8. Public Library & Community Center - DE-Lab

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8. PUBLIC LIBRARY & COMMUNITY CENTER

THE LIBRARY AS A LIVING ORGANISM

Programmed Brick Architecture

De Lab Graduation project - 1st round

Faculty of Engineering - Ain Shams University

Department of Architecture

Status: Graduation Project

Year: 2022

Typology: Library

Location: New Giza, Egypt.

Supervised by: Assoc Prof. Ayman Assem & Prof. Doaa Kamal Eldin Hassan.

T.A.: Eng. Ahmed Nady & Eng. Muhammed H. Darwish.

Prologue

This is a building project within the parent DE-Lab team multidisciplinary graduation research project, The Programmed Brick Architecture, and it's architectural application project, Cultural City at New Giza.

The proposed buildings would be built using specially-manufactured construction robots which offer higher precision and reliability for achieving more demanding brick designs.

The Problem

For libraries to connect with the people, attention must be directed into where people actually tend to spend free time, and particularly to the current typology that operates as society's third place* in Egypt: the Café. Can the library benefit from the café experience in Egypt as a third place?

*Third Place (coined by sociologist Ray Oldenberg, The Great Good Place): A place where people spend time between home (1st place) and work (second place). It can be thought of as the living room of our collective society.

Site Analysis & Form Generation

The Library can be especially regarded as a living organism, in the sense that it experiences growth (growth in content). This project attempts a formal representation of this process:

Content (Information Growth) as Form

The International Bibliographic Classification System was an inspiration for space arrangement, to facilitate book-finding as well as intuitive material growth.

The library is divided into 9 sections by topic. As material under a particular topic increases, vertical extension is constructed for this topic's book space via usage of the project's construction robots, thus overlapping construction and operation phases, so that the library would seem to grow formally along with growth of the content itself.