Flying books in morphed shapes create spaces and connection of knowledge and freedom
The considerations above books and our project are mostly about their duality. Back and front, when they are open, hard and soft, inner and outer parts, or lighter and whiter in, heavier and darker out…or even flexible the pages, motionless the cover.
Though this we came directly with a main division of this two parts, imaging the cover as the strong outer surfaces of the pavilion, and the pages as real content, the warm they can make you feel, the beauty made by the color of the pages and their shape once bended, as in the picture.
Books in to Architecture by adding new material. Our action was to insert a structure, as you can see in the drawn scheme, between these parts, in the only empty space inside this solid structure as a book is. A structure where a steel string supports them, and at the same time smaller X strings keep the cover up. This structure will works as a path roofs and a connection between points (trees, lampposts, walls) that represent different places (Cataluña to Spain or city to city in Cataluña) where the books, or the knowledge, so the freedom, is the jumper wire between them. By this, transforming books in Architecture.
The final result is though as a book in a bigger scale, maintaining the sense of discovery and mystery that every book has, and the feeling of knowledge once you are in, in the pavilion and in the middle of a book. As architects, working with shapes more than words, we design the pages bending them as a sort of origami in order to make them communicate. A communication which can have lots of different readings, but mostly well connected with the sense of freedom, these pages will look to fly as free birds, or a dove, sign of peace, as well as the sheets are white. And also the configuration of all these roofs should follow the birds’ flight trajectory; a biomimetic way to underline the natural being of the books, made by trees’ trunk, far away from digital world.
As this structure will set up and figure out the general shape of the plaza, defining, dividing or accentuating its spaces, we’ll better accommodate these ones to be livable in a more different ways than an usual library, with various uses of books; this time the object is created using in two separate ways the outer and inner part of books, again. The cover is the resistant and solid one, the pages will work as a soft thing, like a pillow, to host people to sit or leaning back. These ones are made just by books except for little pieces of natural rubber at the bottom, as frictions to the floor. This module, made by four books, can be multiplied by people themselves according to the use they want to.
The scheme of these strings can be easily replaced on the floor by long and curved books’ shelf, creating a dynamic space.
After analyzing books themselves and some structure with them at the beginning, and developing a urban scale flying ceiling, in the third day we came back to the small scale, thinking about lighting in the night and shading during the day. We’ll put LED light inside the bended pages in order to have the effect of seeing the only flying pages, lighted with the orange yellow light, as in the picture of reference, to give a warming feeling to people passing through, without seeing the dark cover. The choice of LED is about space, so we can have small strings who can make a gradient lighting, and about reaction to rain. Worrying about rain and the sheets we have tried to put the bended book under water, and see when dried how does he look like; the result was quite fine but not enough, maybe stronger the structure but too creepy for a pavilion of freedom, seemed more a vulture than a dove, so we’ll look for some solution with protective varnish. Regarding the shadow we tried different solutions, as shown in the picture, making small prototype, on how these steel strings can connect themselves and move during the day, along a given axe built by us. So combining the movement of the shapes as the projection of birds’ path, and a real kinetic movement to define new spaces.