At a time when the economic state of the United States is at a point where it is impacting the way students and current architects are going about designing certain building types, Alan Lu, who is currently the Presidential Fellow at MIT is deeply engrained within the realm of form, fabrication and the endless pursuit of luxury through space. His studies and research is demonstrated in his Lechmere Public Library design in Boston, Massachusetts where his hybrid form of institutional and private space combines to exist as a single entity. More images and description after the break.
The library is one of the few remaining free public domains, yet with current economic conditions threatening the operations and existence of these very institutions, a new hybridity of institutional and consumer space must be developed in which the library is preserved as the last remaining guardian of print and the physical book. To accomplish this, we must reconstitute the typical programmatic makeup of the library into a scheme that folds in privatized culture and the very activities that were once thought to threaten the idea of free public space itself. It is only in this way where we exploit private programs for its inherent abilities to attract and keep the public so the institution of the library continues to exist and even prosper. Perhaps the most pertinent example of this is the current sale of Donnell Library Branch of the New York Library System to Orient-Express Hotels, a group intending to replace the current building with a multiple story luxury hotel with a new library branch in the bottom floors. If space is a marketing tool, then a model where library and private entertainment center exists in one space can be a way to promote both simultaneously for the sake of preservation and profit.
