Masters Thesis Project, RMIT School of Architecture & Urban Design - Patrick Macasaet. Supervisor - Professor Vivian Mitsogianni. 2011. Anne Butler Memorial Award 2011. Leon Van Schaik 25th Anniversary Peer-Assessed Award 2011. AIA Combined University Graduate Prize 2011 Shortlist. Featured in SuckerPunch.

This project considers and explores how contaminations of ‘other’ typologies can assist in re-inventing programmatic organization and spatial arrangements. The project investigates how particular strategies of making, influenced by type, can generate new propositions for learning environments and the library. As a testing ground, a generated “what-if” scenario proposes RMIT’s first civic-academic library and merges the three city libraries (Swanston, Carlton and Business Library).

The project attempts to emphasise the informal side of academic life, not as residual but as a central feature of universities. It embraces the collaborative and the informal as the heroic spaces for learning – viewing learning as a social experience and envisioning a speculative library as a highly charged collaborative and informal learning environment, intensifying its communal and social dimension.

This proposition tested ideas and carried out a series of investigations through both generative and manual processes concentrating on two building types: the stock exchange and the atrium office building. Experiments were choreographed and re-choreographed with minor or major variations in order to open up new possibilities for formal, organisational and spatial strategies for a highly collaborative learning environment.

ISSUES/OPPORTUNITIES/POSITION
Library as a Civic Laboratory. University libraries will no longer be simply repositories of books but as a porous knowledge place designed for learning providing resources that enable a variety of learning and teaching spaces.

Library as a Third Place. They will become an open and permeable, local and global public space. They no longer will be a silent retreat but will provide a bustling, communicative social arena for people to learn, think, explore, play, reflect and socialize.

Library as a Data Mine. They will specialize in data mining information relevant to the local interests and continue as research and learning centers.

Library as a Self-Sufficient Unit. Libraries may forge partnerships with other organizations to develop services and programs becoming competitors to commercial organizations.

TYPOLOGY
Instead of visualising the library as an open place and flexible space, the experiments have involved the exaggeration of the stock exchange’s trading floor as an organizational and formal strategy with the intent of creating an internal topography for learning with continuous visual links, merging circulation with the learning and hybrid spaces the library will provide.

The process re-imagines the central atrium office: not as a massive single void but rather as more of a multiplied and shredded network of academic and civic spaces affecting the re-distribution and adjacencies of programme.

SYSTEM
To amplify the precedent type’s traits, the project attempted to capture the behaviour of seismic reflection to generate a displacement, expansion and contraction of volumes creating a stratified interior: re-distributing programmatic adjacencies and spatial arrangements. The final outcome and experiment was not the product of a singular experiment. Experiments were choreographed and re-choreographed with minor or major variations in order to open new possibilities for formal, organisational and spatial strategies for a highly collaborative learning environment. Each experiment essentially generated a proposition of its own.

CONSEQUENCES
As a consequence of the processes and experiments, the normative precedent type amplified its qualities for a learning environment and the library.

The main collaborative area of the building highlights the compressed spatial arrangements and adjacencies of the library. Noisy areas to quiet zones maintain continuous visual links and permeability to the far edges intensifying the gathering spaces with glimpses of the shredded atrium. The stadium-like and voluminous traits of the precedent type were amplified generating a series of interconnected plateaus to maximize collaboration.

Plateau-like conditions also exist within the longitudinal section. As we continue up, there was a deliberate attempt to cast aside the library stacks into a compact and normative circulatory-ramp space in order to give primacy to the more inspiring spaces for the students.

The ground merges programmes of civic (tourist centre and café), resources, administration and learning. Adjacencies continue vertically where we are able to experience and see glimpses of the next layer as we traverse upwards.

Reaching the main collaborative library space’s foyer on level four, we get moments of compressed programmatic and spatial conditions: seminar rooms, group rooms, quiet zones, group pits. But we also get moments of relief where the building opens up and allows views throughout the building.

A variety of learning and collaborative environments litter the floors from quiet zones, studio/workrooms, lounges and training rooms but still keeping visual links throughout the building.

The higher levels house administrative and research areas with a café at the topmost level. These spaces still maintain views towards the lower levels of the building maintaining a connection and not isolating it as a different part of the building.

A series of opened cross-sections highlights the variation of spaces and spatial conditions evident throughout the building. These conditions do not merely stop but continue throughout. We get moments of large hall-like spaces, to compressed collaborative layers but still also have quite normative areas.

The plans exhibit the shredding and re-distribution that the crafted process was able to create to make new programmatic adjacencies and spatial conditions simultaneously getting a variation of spaces.

The building’s external treatment attempts to continue the language that has generated the variation of spaces. It experimented with displacing and amplifying the curtain wall and mullions to be able to read the three distinct volumes: the generic office, the shredded atria, and the trade floor.