Musashino Art University Museum and Library | Sou Fujimoto Architects

Leaf Awards 2012 | Public Build of the year Winner Tokyo / Japan / 2010

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This project is a new library for one of the distinguished art universities in Japan. It involves designing a new library building and refurbishing the existing building into an art gallery. The new library sits within the first phase of the total development. Acting as a huge ark, a total of 200,000 units, of which 100,000 will be out in an open archive while the other half remain within a closed archive, rests within this double-storey library of 6,500m² in floor area. An infinite forest of books is created from layering 9m-high walls punctuated by large apertures. This spiral sequence of the bookshelf continues to eventually wrap the periphery of the site as the external wall, allowing the external appearance of the building to share the same elemental composition of the bookshelf-as-the-library. One’s encounter with the colossally long bookshelf within the university landscape registers instantaneously as a library, yet is astonishing in its dreamlike simplicity. Investigation and exploration are inherent in the design of libraries. Even in the age of Google, the experience of searching for books within the library is marked by the order and arrangement of the physical volume of books. The significance of library experience is also in the discovery of the space by the users. One encounters the space as constantly renewed and transforming, discovers undefined relationships, and gains inspiration from unfamiliar fields. Here, the two apparent contradictions inherent in libraries are allowed to coexist through a spiral form possessing two antinomic movements of a radial path and rotational movement. One can acknowledge the entirety of the library and at the same time imagine that there are unknown spaces that are rendered constantly imperceptible.
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    This project is a new library for one of the distinguished art universities in Japan. It involves designing a new library building and refurbishing the existing building into an art gallery. The new library sits within the first phase of the total development. Acting as a huge ark, a total of 200,000 units, of which 100,000 will be out in an open archive while the other half remain within a closed archive, rests within this double-storey library of 6,500m² in floor area. An infinite forest of...

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