The brief discusses how architecture shifted towards open-endedness fifty years ago, emphasizing adaptability, impermanence, and flexibility in buildings. Architects challenged traditional notions of authorship and outcomes, and buildings transformed into dynamic systems. Design theories embraced free plans, modular units, and various building components. The brief introduces a studio project focused on Eduardo Catalano’s Boston Public Library, a site that played a role in the open-endedness debate. The task involves doubling the building’s area while considering whether to endorse, refine, or deviate from the original principles. The challenge is to engage with the building’s arguments and make a stance, addressing a longstanding architectural question in the context of contemporary perspectives.
The project opens a dialogue with the heroic architecture in the context of dancing in the realm of in-between. The proposed double of the library confuses the quantity and quality of a double itself: site and non-site, private and public, sidewalk and plaza, twins and doppelganger, as well as image and reflection. The project visually doubles the image of the library, the solid and void volume, and the programs of the original building. The proposal also confuses the scale of operation of the neighborhood library, as it performs on the macro scale in providing public access to the neighborhood with its public plaza and communal activity space in the original building, as well as altering the scale of the library itself, where the programs are reorganized to allow the essence of its original library while accomodating to the new programs.
