Daegu Gosan Public Library
2012
Location Daegu Metropolitan City, Korea
Typology Public Library
Status Competition Proposal
Size 6,000m²
Our proposal for this project starts from interpreting the complicated urban context upon the preexisting typical development strategy, and aims at positioning the library as a socially condensed public space in the community. The social tendency towards individualization accelerates in order to reduce the governmental occupation of land and unintentionally deduces a certain lifestyle relating to social isolation. In this sense, we think, in spite of the malleable contextual foundation, the library should create a stabilized and semi-permanent place in the community due to its functional characteristics by avoiding privatized development and collective desires.
In the proposal, we consider how the library can maintain the previous emptiness in the interior space which is positively operated for public activities and events that the site currently accommodates.
(1) Lower part of the building - The public corridor at the ground floor extends the inner connectivity to the exterior, penetrating the entire building. This 6~8m wide ravine is expected to generate various public activities for the community.
(2) Upper part of the building - In order to guarantee the openness at the ground level, the program of the library is located on the upper level—the 3rd and 4th floors. Considering the required seclusion derived by the original nature of libraries, it is enclosed and independent from exterior conditions.
Lifting up the library program, we also considered the urban scale and the pattern of future urban development. Read as a floating massive object, the library strategizes the volumetric consensus to the apartment blocks since the protruded box from the urban block surrounded by lower houses is visually exposed at the higher level. By comparison, the subdivision of faceted glazing reacts on a similar scale to that of the lower building volumes. Beyond the scaling resonance to the current urban contexts, the curtain wall system at the lower floors will work to achieve more openness rather than sunlight as the neighborhood becomes denser in the future. It is expected that urban development will potentially make the community denser, the widely opened interior spaces under the library therefore, will be one of the rare places that gives the visual openness at street level.
Emphasizing the geometrical continuity of the ceiling, the vertically deepened space enables a specifically morphed functional relativity that adapts to the differentiated density of the programmed space. The entire structural system is composed of two separate but assembled stacks within a two story high mushroom-like concrete structure. They have similar appearances but different structural organizations that react based on the different requirements.
