Jose Vasconcelos Public Library, Mexico Building Contest Project, Design Images

Jose Vasconcelos Public Library Mexico

Mexican Architecture Competition Entry – design by Pascal Arquitectos

5 Feb 2009

Jose Vasconcelos Public Library

Location: Mexico City

Design: Pascal Arquitectos

Jose Vasconcelos Public Library

Why build a library today? seems absurd, it would be more logical to build a museum for books.

This would be like a mausoleum, a masterpiece of our last president who in a patron’s act wanted to be remembered and transcend through its materiality. His intentions were to mimic what was done with the construction of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao; to trigger the real estate recovery of the zone by creating added value to the adjacent land.

Although from the beginning we suspected that the results were already fixed, we did not want to miss the experience of the exercise. Anyway our project was amongst the top fifty that were selected from the almost seven hundred that were submitted.

Until the age of the internet the process of reading a book would be to start from the beginning and finish at the end, and even though the end was there no one would dare to read it before the beginning.

Nowadays everything is simultaneous, the cognitive process has changed, with the internet there is no beginning and no end, only hypertext an hypervinculation, there is no linear sequence in time and space, it is more in the order of the fractal.

Knowledge is not specific either, as an example ,you cannot see today medicine, without relating it to genetics engineering, etc, same should apply to spaces. In this project as form does not follow function any more because function is continually changing, there would be no specificity of spaces just hypervinculation of a series of changing and evolving spaces.

As there is no beginning and no end, and most of the Jose Vasconcelos Public Library building is underground : you cannot see, its beginning or it’s end. It also melts into the urban landscape, the are no limits but diffused frontiers, you just see the tip of the iceberg everything else is unknown.
Paradigms are broken, architecture is not formed out of walls columns, floors,windows, it is a whole that cannot be broken down in parts anymore.

Jose Vasconcelos Public Library Address: Eje 1 Norte esq. Aldama s/n. colonia Buenavista, Delegación Cuauhtémoc, México D.F., postal code 06350

Jose Vasconcelos Public Library images / information from Pascal Arquitectos

Pascal Arquitectos

Location: Delegación Cuauhtémoc, México D.F., Mexico, North America