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STRETCHING LIBRARY
Guadalajara, Mexico, May 2005
See the sea, imagine a sea, in this land of heat and near-desert and big overwhelming sky. It’s the plaza here that takes the place of the sea. The surrounding buildings cause disturbances: the plaza is a sea of waves and ripples, alternating currents of pavement and greenery. Here and there a wave comes over you, to make a hovel, a workstation. You walk between ripples, over waves, into the whirlpool of the library;
You spiral down the whirlpool, into the ground. This is the library of inaccessible books. You zigzag between shelves, in and out of shelves, dead-ends of shelves.
At the bottom of the spiral down, as you continue walking you begin to spiral up. The library spurts up, like a geyser, from the depths of the whirlpool; this is the library of accessible books. If the space below ground is a labyrinth, the space coming up out of the ground is like an attic, a garage sale; the books are up for grabs here. Bumps of books, globes of books, like tiny worlds, like disco balls—not shelves but bundles, packets, of books: you’re in an air of books, you pass in-between books.
As the library spirals up, it spirals out; books are dangerous, ideas run wild, there’s a world out there. This is a library on the loose and on the move; it curves over the highway and makes a bridge.
(The library will reach out further as years go by. It can expand linearly: the tentacle stretches, tentacles grow out tentacles and squeeze in-between existent buildings. It can expand within itself: its curved façade bulges and swells as it spirals down and up.)
This project view belongs to Guadalajara Library, and is threadged with:
(I,
L,
T,
A)