Project UnLibrary
WHAT IF YOU TOOK OVER A LIBRARY? HOW WOULD IT LOOK LIKE?
Project UnLibrary is a social experiment to prototype a participatory ‘library within a library’. This would involve a group of outsiders who were non-librarians, who would ‘take over’ a space within a public library, and redesign it towards an end-goal in mind.
Planned as a series of design workshops for professionals, the design process was meant to be participatory and evolutionary in nature, and would begin with the an artistic director of good standing (dubbed as ‘the iconic Personality’) being invited by the National Library Board to envision the overall concept of the ‘UnLibrary’ space and lead a team of volunteer designers who would draw inspirations through a deconstruction of the Personality: his/her life, career, works, inspirations, dreams, roads not taken and so on.
The team then conceptualise an interactive showcase within the library space and an external vendor would then be engaged to construct or set up the ‘final’ design deemed acceptable to NLB. The UnLibrary space would then be open to the public for a period of time and members of the public will be invited to visit, embellish, reconfigure, and evaluate the UnLibrary. At the end of the Project, the iconic Personality and the volunteers would attempt to make sense of the UnLibrary’s evolutionary end-state, and to determine if the final output is viable as an end-product or the start of a new cycle.
The test bed for this prototype was the library@esplanade, a public library in Singapore which specialises in the performing arts (theatre, music, dance & film).
About the library@esplanade:
The library@esplanade, Singapore’s first performing arts library, was officially opened on 12 September 2002. A one-stop resource library for the performing arts spanning an area of 2,300 square metres, the library@esplanade also offers information and services in the areas of music, dance, theatre and film. The library’s location on the third level of The Esplanade, Theatres on the Bay is unique within Singapore, and makes it one of the few libraries in the world to be co-located within a performing arts complex.
