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The Visual and Performing Arts Library
The Visual and Performing Arts Library
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Other Projects by Huff + Gooden Architects
The Visual and Performing Arts Library
The Visual and Performing Arts Library (VPA) for the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) represents a fundamental shift in the conception of a library as a repository and retrieval center for archival materials traditionally held in book form. Serving as an electronic and physical gateway to arts resources shared by the BPL and the Brooklyn Academy of Music Local Development Corporation (BAM LDC), the building’s program includes performance spaces, exhibit spaces, special galleries, a 24/7 media lounge, cafe, retail bookshop, artists’ studios, library function, and administrative areas. Huff + Gooden Architects was one of four firms invited to this international design competition.
The design deploys sustainable design strategies which are integrated into the building’s conceptual strategies. Most apparent is the highly calibrated glass curtain wall of glass fins and louvers to modulate day-lighting and solar heat gain. Other sustainable features include photo-voltaic film cells, a solar water heating system, ground-source heat pump system, and a green roof.
Virtual access to digital information (locally and globally) via the computer dislocates the traditional library typology signified by the figure of historic “great” reading rooms. The inability to locate the library typologically results in a “dis-figural” space that fluctuates in relationship to the actual and virtual states of information represented by the traditional archive stack and by the proposed digital stack that houses the library’s data center and Information technology functions. These actual and virtual states of information situate the dialogue of presence versus absence and past versus future in the new library.
Hence, the new paradigm for the library is situated upon the relationships of events in time rather than historic spatial typologies. The proposed program for the VPA is recast in terms of a “time matrix” that situates events and duration rather than mere area requirements.
Spatial Strategy
Overlapping and Interlocking spaces are situated relative to actual and virtual states of information signified by the digital stack and the archive stack, library functions and public access to cultural offerings. The “Vertical Stage” is a performance space of movement, event, and structure inhabiting the “dis-figured” condition of the new library.
Event Strategy
The dialogue of actual / virtual and absence / presence triggers the re-programming of the building’s functions in terms of the relativity of space-time events and duration. Hence, the temporal qualities of the program yield simultaneity, overlap, and fluctuation of space-time that expands and contracts in “disfigural” space.
Tectonic Strategy
The building’s cast-in-place concrete superstructure, (columns, beams and floor slabs), participates in the choreography of space within the vertical stage and throughout the building. “Dancing Columns” in the vertical stage are a “performance structure” supporting cantilevered concrete beams that suspend ramps, walkways and reading zones along the structural glass curtain wall system yielding transparency between event space and urban space along Flatbush Avenue.
Along Ashland Place the translucent green onyx wall translates the building’s capacity for silence while simultaneously revealing the shadows of movement and event within the semi-public and private spaces of the library at night. Structural glass mullions in combination with horizontal fins, diagonal mullions, and saw tooth panes modulate southern and western light throughout the day. The combination of glass configurations yields a “wall of pixilated light” that registers and transmits movements and events in the “vertical stage” to the urban condition along Flatbush Avenue.
The design deploys sustainable design strategies which are integrated into the building’s conceptual strategies. Most apparent is the highly calibrated glass curtain wall of glass fins and louvers to modulate day-lighting and solar heat gain. Other sustainable features include photo-voltaic film cells, a solar water heating system, ground-source heat pump system, and a green roof.
Virtual access to digital information (locally and globally) via the computer dislocates the traditional library typology signified by the figure of historic “great” reading rooms. The inability to locate the library typologically results in a “dis-figural” space that fluctuates in relationship to the actual and virtual states of information represented by the traditional archive stack and by the proposed digital stack that houses the library’s data center and Information technology functions. These actual and virtual states of information situate the dialogue of presence versus absence and past versus future in the new library.
Hence, the new paradigm for the library is situated upon the relationships of events in time rather than historic spatial typologies. The proposed program for the VPA is recast in terms of a “time matrix” that situates events and duration rather than mere area requirements.
Spatial Strategy
Overlapping and Interlocking spaces are situated relative to actual and virtual states of information signified by the digital stack and the archive stack, library functions and public access to cultural offerings. The “Vertical Stage” is a performance space of movement, event, and structure inhabiting the “dis-figured” condition of the new library.
Event Strategy
The dialogue of actual / virtual and absence / presence triggers the re-programming of the building’s functions in terms of the relativity of space-time events and duration. Hence, the temporal qualities of the program yield simultaneity, overlap, and fluctuation of space-time that expands and contracts in “disfigural” space.
Tectonic Strategy
The building’s cast-in-place concrete superstructure, (columns, beams and floor slabs), participates in the choreography of space within the vertical stage and throughout the building. “Dancing Columns” in the vertical stage are a “performance structure” supporting cantilevered concrete beams that suspend ramps, walkways and reading zones along the structural glass curtain wall system yielding transparency between event space and urban space along Flatbush Avenue.
Along Ashland Place the translucent green onyx wall translates the building’s capacity for silence while simultaneously revealing the shadows of movement and event within the semi-public and private spaces of the library at night. Structural glass mullions in combination with horizontal fins, diagonal mullions, and saw tooth panes modulate southern and western light throughout the day. The combination of glass configurations yields a “wall of pixilated light” that registers and transmits movements and events in the “vertical stage” to the urban condition along Flatbush Avenue.
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