The Brief
If most information now lives online, the library has to be more than its books.
Library of Our Times was a design proposal for a library at SIM, developed in the years after Covid. The studio began with a question rather than a plan: what is the relevance of a physical library when most of its information can be reached digitally?
Quod Architects answered by treating the library less as a store of books and more as a place to be. Sited directly in front of a landscaped garden, the library was conceived as a social space that flows out of the natural environment, the building and its garden read as one.
A library that flows from a garden
The proposal places the library at the threshold of a landscaped garden and lets the two run together. The natural environment is not a view through a window but the starting point of the interior, drawing the social life of the garden indoors.
ConceptThe garden read as the beginning of the interior, not a backdrop to it.
Zoned, from social to silent
The library area is meaningfully zoned along a single gradient. Social terraces sit nearer the entrance, where activity and noise belong, while the quiet individual study carrels are positioned further in, away from the door. One walk through the building is a walk from conversation to concentration.
In Closing
A place to be, not just to borrow from
The proposal does not argue that the physical library is obsolete. It argues that its value has shifted, from holding information to holding people.
Open to a garden and zoned from social to silent, Library of Our Times is the studio's answer to a question the times had started to ask.
Q.E.D.