The library where you can get lost

Competition Tokyo Japan _ Honorable mention 

Today the private house is the library, the street is the library, the bench in the park is the library. Wherever there is internet connection, we have the possibility to find what we are looking for. However, is a library a place to look for something or a place to get lost in order to find the unexpected?

The Anti Library will be a space to lose oneself, a place to climb searching for something, it is not a single building, but a building made of fragments of other spaces assembled together. The library consists of 58 rooms. Rooms with many books, rooms with just one book, rooms to talk, rooms to study, rooms to eat, rooms to sleep. Loitering among the rooms allows for fortuitous encounters with people and books that we are not looking for, but that attracts our attention. The library is conceived as a vertical city, a mountain to climb slowly up and then quickly down. Stopping to observe Tokyo from the cuts in the wall or stopping because books we didn’t know before attract us. It will be a space to spend the night if we fancy it, it will be a refuge to isolate ourselves or to share. The Library in the digital age is a secret space, a library that lets people eat, drink, and converse while they share information.

The building is devised to be recognizable, it will look at the city with its big eyes. The impact of the library will be intense and symbolic and will reflect the nature of the contemporary city. This library is the metaphor of the city. The library is the city of Tokyo.