Stratford Dialogue
Stratford and communities like it incorporate aspects of the urban and the rural, and the library addresses this duality : in the main building books are retrieved mechanically - an ordered activity, monumentally marked - while in the park the reader may browse in a random setting. « Stratford dialogue » is not prototypical in form, but it demonstrates a prototypical approach.
(From competitor's text)
Dan Benson and Leslie Woo titled their project "Stratford Dialogue" because a) they selected a site in Straftord, Ontario, and b) their design establishes a positive tension between paired conditions: URBAN/MONUMENTAL/MECHANICAL and RURAL/RANDOM/MANUAL. It is a complex story that slowly reveals itself through a provocative set of drawings. Sited between Ontario Street and the Avon River and crossing over Erie Street, the composition might be seen as a kind of "Fragmented Classicism" which includes carefully articulated bridges and towers extending into the picturesque landscape. The primary building element is a domed, urban piece that is tight along Ontario and Erie Streets. It contains an exhibition courtyard, a "Great Hall", audio visual facilities, reading rooms, and book stacks with a mechanical retrieval system. This is the URBAN/MONUMENTAL/MECHANICAL condition, inserted in a building type that is clearly a theatre: fly tower and stages (in the round, proscenium and thrust) are transformed to accommodate the requirements of the assigned library programme.
Then, across Erie Street and connected by a bridge, one finds a second building. This one is somewhat smaller than the first one and contains an auditorium and additional reading/studying spaces. Here one finds, attached to the facade facing the river, three rocketship-like towers. These amazing "mechanical turrents" are attached to the building during the Canadian winter but roll out into the garden in the summer. Finally one can be alone, reading a book amongst the trees with the city seeming far away: strict order gives way to the second set of conditions: RURAL/RANDOM/MANUAL. Benson and Woo call this scene the "Comic Landscape". And the towers have names: The "Children's Tower", the "Non-Fiction Tower", and the "Adult Fiction Tower". They are all actors on one more Stratford stage. The library that Benson and Woo propose is, in their words, "non prototypical in form, but [...] demonstrates a prototypical approach." In their minds the Carnegie Library of the future is a theatrical, dynamic place - remembering the past but deeply rooted in the fragmentary complexity of a present time and place.
- Larry Richards
(From official publication)
11 scanned / 11 viewable
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Plan
- Plan & Section
- Plan & Section
- Perspective
- Axonometric Drawing
- Perspective
- Elevation
- Elevation
