Habitable Bookshelves

Critic: Marc Tsurumaki

Efficiency regulates architecture in a multiplicity of forms. Re-evaluating efficiency in architecture recognizes that every efficiency implies a corresponding excess, exorbitance and waste. Extreme, perverse and satirical efficiencies can generate new programmatic and spatial opportunities. It creates a productive exorbitance. One type of efficiency is the structural that aims to have more height and longer spams by using robust structures. There is more material extracted or produced and the structure itself occupies a large space. By scaling down the structural members there could be less material produced, and the space that the structure once used becomes occupiable and habitable. Books can be storage within in a structure, thus bookshelves can be used as module that builds occupiable spaces. There is also a natural affinity between children’s scale and small structural members, thus the module of the bookshelf could be adapted to different heights. This children library will be part of the New York Public Libraries system, and will have a neighborhood scale. Because Washington Heights is the most populated neighborhood in the city with less branch libraries, the project will be located in this area. 

Columbia University, GSAPP