Project 3- North End Rare Books Library- Early Stuff

Our last project, and the only one we had more than a week and half to do, was a rare books library in the North End of Boston (super dense Italian neighborhood). The site was jammed in the middle of a block spanning narrowly between two side streets. There was a Franciscan church across the street on one side and a super ugly apartment building adjacent to the site that had no dialogue with the street whatsoever. There were two primary site axises, one running perpendicular to the two streets and one running diagronally across the site dividing the site into two triangular spaces. From the offset, I used these axes to define my formal moves. I developed a wrapping surface system which would define and divide the programmatic elements of the library and would provide a broad based formal gesture that would efffectively be reflected the materiality of the building as well as the structural elements of the building.