JOSE VASCONCELAS LIB.

The project integrates the public library with a botanical garden. A 250 meter steel, concrete and glass structure surrounded by greenery and water.

The design is based in four fundamental considerations :

1. Mexico City is one of the largest, most polluted and agresive urban environments in the planet. We believe that the planning of public funded buildings should always encourage the expansion of car-free open spaces and greenery
2. The specific area where the project was built was a barren urban landscape
3. The buildings and gardens generate a new pole of urban ecological regeneration that expands over a densely populated area
4. The library is itself an attempt at reorganizing available human knowledge

The Botanical Garden houses a comprehensive array of Mexicos endemic flora. Culture and nature, often on opposing sides, form a unity in which the visitor can reconcile their co-existence. The reading areas offer the user an opportunity for experimenting direct contact with nature. All areas profit from natural lighting and ventilation.

The library is a great ship that navigates through time enveloped in a garden that´s always itself and always new.

The library is a tripartite bilateral symmetrical structure with three bays of hanging book stacks in the center, readings areas on the perimeter. The grand lobby is a civic landscape, with stairs leading up to the bookstacks on both sides. The concrete slabs are functioning as grids. The ventilation system is a special one where air comes in through the slits on the facades and comes into the central atrium up to the roof. The essence of the library is the space between the staggered bookstacks, with the rhyme of the bays accentuating the perspectives. The books are objectified and are almost data-like, rather inaccesible

thesis questions

A friend of mine is working on his thesis, and he showed me the GSD thesis prize winner of 2011 Greg Tran titled as Mediating Mediums (http://vimeo.com/24860709). He proposed a possibility of a digital 3-D reality which ties to the real world material and accentuated the designer's role on meditating the two. It came up with the question of whether 2-D representation is still viable since we essentially design with 3-D rhino models nowadays. I think it is a good idea to think about what I am interested in as of now to start the collection of potential thesis, because I believe that thesis is the culmination of the architectural problems that I have been contemplative about and propose a potential paradigm to resolve them.

As of now,

1) how people start a design, how the design progress, and how to make the final jump to invent the cleverness in a design.
2) How to translate the architecture in other subjects into the real architectural language



I went to the MIT thesis review a few days ago and I found out that I am only interested in the proposals that are radical and question the fundamentals of architecture. It should be more than a building, it should be a proposal, a paradigm shifting design or even a new kind of ideology on both psychological and material level.