PSBCO.

In the age of digital publishing, a traditional library is losing its ground as a building type. Due to high maintaining and running cost of the building, difficulty to build a book collections, building a new library can be challenging. Given our site is a low-income neighborhood on the parameter of the city. An auxiliary financial model becomes necessary to make the building self-sustainable.

As the site for the 1875 Philadelphia Centennial Expo, the neighborhood is full of secret gems of architectural designs. The project extracts the local building elements and compose them in a defamiliarized way that they resemble the neighborhood but entail a completely different story, aiming to create a building that seems alien, but yet very familiar to the neighborhood.

Defamiliarization is the process of articulation and presentation of common items in an uncanny way. The urban studio discovers, and extracts building elements from the neighborhood and reconstructs them as architectural elements on the site. Individual items are aggregated and manipulated to resemble the neighborhood in a defamiliarized yet eccentric fashion.  

A historical column cap is applied in a weaving pattern, aiming to provide some soft quality to the supposedly solid element. The highly decorative Corinthian column cap are stacked and staggered, creating undulating surfaces on both the façade and the roof. Not only do the column caps become an interesting skin treatment, they also perform as the structure of the building.  

The proposal captures the growing craft beer and micro-brewery trend and thinks the big image for long term growth. The success of this library - brewery will play a major role in the revitalization of the Park Side neighborhood. 

The site is proportionally divided with the extension of the city grids into 4 parts - for the purposes of the library, brewery, shipping center and the barley field. The buildings claim the edge of the site and the landscape creates pockets within the site.