Fairy tales
have transfixed readers for thousands of years, and for many reasons; one of
the most compelling is the promise of a magical home. How many architects,
young and old, have been inspired by a hero or heroine who must imagine new
realms and new spaces — new ways of being in this strange world?
In three
installments this week, we continue a series of architectural fairy tales we
began two winters ago. Participating firms — Rice+Lipka Architects, studio
SUMO, and Bernheimer Architecture — have produced works exploring the intimate
relationship between the domestic structures of fairy tales and the imaginative
realm of architecture.
Houses in
fairy tales are never just houses; they always contain secrets and dreams. This
project presents a new path of inquiry, a new line of flight into architecture
as a fantastic, literary realm of becoming. We welcome you to these fairy-tale
places.
The Library
of Babel
“The
Library of Babel” is a terrifying and beautiful story by prophetic Argentine
author Jorge Luis Borges, written when he was employed shelving books in the
city library.
First
published in a shorter version as “The Total Library,” this dense, nine-page
story concerns a library that houses all of the books ever written and yet to
be written. The Library is arranged non-hierarchically; all of the volumes —
from the most rudimentary to the most inscrutable — are equally important in
this infinite space. Its rooms are hexagons. Its staircases are broken.
The
Library’s many visitors — elated, dogmatic and anguished types are all
represented — strangle one another in the corridors. They fall down air shafts
and perish. They weep, or go mad. Desperate characters hide in the bathrooms,
“rattling metal disks inside dice cups,” hoping to mind-read the call number
for a missing canonical text. Others, overcome with “hygienic, ascetic rage,”
stand before entire walls of books, denouncing the volumes, raising their
fists.
The Library
is described exquisitely, with mathematical detail. For readers who have
trouble with the math in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this fairy tale also
offers a sensation of dread. The Library does not represent completely
incomplete beauty and madness: it is completely incomplete beauty and madness.
And Borges’s language is everyday — the story is a municipal prayer. To say the
world is an infinite library and we are mad pilgrims destined for beauty and
failure is not to say an occult thing, but a real thing. Fairy tales are real; the
Library of Babel is real. It’s a real story, that is.
I was so
delighted when you agreed this tale was a great fit — it seemed to resonate
with what I’d seen in your firm’s work. What was it that drew you to the story?
A childhood memory? An image? A building you already knew?
We are
simply fascinated with the story — with the breadth of possible architectural
outcomes given the specificity of Borges’s description of the Library, with the
notion that all the books that could ever be written would be accessible
(essentially providing access to future knowledge), and with its prediction of
our contemporary condition of living with overwhelming access to information.
Was there
anything in the fairy tale that presented a specific problem for you from a design
perspective, and how did you solve that problem?
Yes, the
library’s size. The modest scale of the individual hexagonal library unit gave
us an illusionary sense of personal scale and intimacy that seemed both
reasonable and understandable. As the extent of the conceit unfolds, the
library’s impenetrability becomes clear, and the illusion that all knowledge is
somehow close at hand slips away. It was fascinating to analyze the text and
mine it for the real, the everyday, the architectural givens of the tale, and
at the same time search the story for what is not prescribed. We took care not
to veer from the specific descriptions of the spaces and their relationships,
and we had to guard against our own assumptions in order to find holes in the
story — its openings for interpretation.
Did you
consider the built execution in your design? If so, who might execute this? If
not, how might you position your architecture within the realm of the unbuilt
and imagined?
We did
speculate about how this structure might be built — it is at once completely
ordinary and impossible. At the scale of the individual unit or unit cluster,
it is easy to imagine; yet by extending it to a size that is even a small
fraction of what the story suggests, we bumped up against magical glitches in
the story. When spacecraft, artificial gravity and space-time warps entered our
internal debates, we knew we were missing the point. At best, our understanding
of the library, like our understanding of the universe, is limited.
Editors’
Note
Our ongoing
series on fairy tale architecture is curated by writer Kate Bernheimer and
architect Andrew Bernheimer, featuring designs by Leven Betts, Guy Nordenson
and Associates, Abruzzo Bodziak, Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO – IL),
Rice+Lipka and Studio SUMO.
See also
“Writ Small,” by Naomi Stead, on architects, architecture and the idea of home
in children’s books.
Fuente : Designobserver
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