Asplund Library
Stockholm, Sweden
One Stage Competition
Sean Lally Design
The library addition operates beyond the envelope of a building or site boundary and engages the surrounding environmental qualities and seasonal climatic conditions for programmatic and organizational strategies. These exterior conditions and the activities occurring within them are controlled and organized as systematically as if they were interior spaces. By enlarging and exploiting the double skin strategy of curtain walls; thermal heating is utilized outwardly to engage the surrounding site, as opposed to internally, interacting with artificial lighting and vegetation resulting in spatial organizations of the entrance, restaurant, and meeting centers that can change in scale and intensity based on an interplay with the existing climate and time of year.
The proposal acknowledges the programmatic requirements of the new library that require specified volumetric dimensions and controlled climatic environments including book storage, administration and auditorium, treating them as a depository to be accessed when needed. This is contrasted with more malleable necessities including entrance, café, restaurant, public meeting areas and circulation that are defined and organized by amplifying material systems prevalent throughout the city and existing park that it’s situated in as a means for engaging the ‘site’ and ‘context’ that extends beyond the property line.
An enlarged and exaggerated double-skin curtain wall enables energy to be trapped and then deployed outward to engage the surrounding site. Smaller seating systems located on the ground plane also serve to distribute the energies locally.
The library addition operates beyond the envelope of the building—and at times beyond the boundary of the site—as it engages and rewrites the surrounding climatic and environmental properties.
This trapped energy defines flexible spatial zones for the entrance, restaurant, and meeting centers that are capable of changing in scale and intensity based on their interplay with the existing climate and time of year in Stockholm.
The interior black masses act as a depository for programs that require stricter environmental control, including book storage and administrative offices. These masses maximize surface area to produce the enlarged double-skin curtain wall.
