The Next Public Library

Culture is the new urban infrastructure supporting city planning and embodying the ever changing sense of urban togetherness. The public library is the key node of this infrastructure, linking people, opportunities and institutions. The project ‘The Next Public Library’ questions the contemporary condition of the public library in its changing identity, programming and architectural characters. However, a contemporary definition of the collective understanding of this public typology is difficult to grasp as it hardly escapes personal imagery and nostalgic rhetoric. The present public library is instead a multifaceted institution offering a multiplicity of new services and media access to all; a powerful and vital pro- active environment for self-directed realization; a public space and public (3 rd ) place of urban sense counter-fighting the erosion of digitally-led public sociality. For this, it has a myriad of possible interpretations acquiring multiple forms. The research operates on parallel layers, and explicitly involves multidisciplinary knowledge along with different stakeholders.

• Investigation on recently designed buildings and projects emphasizing their narratives, fascinations and interpretations informing the mapping of an emerging new understanding of the upcoming public library.

• Exploration and foresights considerations about new developments (prosumers, fablabs, digitalization and raising technologies, symbiosis) to produce an open chart of possible futures.
• The position of the next library between past and future (collections-production cross-fertilization, heritage and innovation, new communication and oral tradition) enables to balance accelerating futures and permanence.
• The contemporary library project as wicked hybrid project bridging digital and physical multiplicity fosters research-through-design activities and explorations.

The research project expresses itself through a cloud of research actions both ongoing or planned:

• Atlas of performative spaces in Dutch Libraries. Ongoing (NWO KIEM subsidy).
• NEDDEN. Mirroring public libraries experiences in the Netherlands and in Denmark. Ongoing.
• Mapping academic libraries in NL. Planned.
• Library of civic alliances: new cultural players. Ongoing.
• Knowledge dissemination about the architecture of (Dutch) public libraries.

The body of knowledge gained through this research also serves (and is tested by) students in architecture through graduations, projects, workshops, symposia.

 You can find the article by Olindo Caso and Joran Kuijper following the cover image.