A Library With A Big Window
Course:
1GA STUDIO
Year:
FALL 2017
Instructor:
David Eskenazi
This project interrogates the formal, spatial, and material transmutation of static structures. Through a choreography of physical operations—folding, shifting, mirroring, and shearing—fixed geometry is released into a state of continuous variation. The inquiry departs from Tony Smith’s monumental sculpture SMOKE, installed in the LACMA Ahmanson Building atrium since 2008. Standing seven meters tall, Smith’s original matrix is an intricate, crystalline lattice of 5 tetrahedrons and 45 elongated octahedrons. This project dismantles that rigid equilibrium, treating the sculpture not as a permanent artifact, but as a site of potential energy and latent forms. By fracturing this established order, the work seeks to discover spatial nuances and retrofitting strategies within an existing rigid system, moving beyond mere formal manipulation into a deeper study of architectural relations. The primary morphological act begins with the dissolution of SMOKE’s structural integrity. By tracing and extracting the centrelines of each individual geometric component, the sculpture is reduced to a skeletal, naked "linear frame." This vector framework is subsequently and systematically destabilized; leg lengths are distended, connection angles warped, and bending directions agitated, while lines are selectively introduced or erased. The resulting "stick model" (Images 1, 2) breaks decisively from its origin, entering a state of continuous alienation and evolutionary drift.
1."Stick Model" Photograph
2."Stick Model" Photograph
3."Unfamiliar Form" Photograph
4.Four Way Projection Of
"Unfamiliar Form"
5.“Thin Skin” And “Fat Coat”
To test the spatial limits of this new framework, the original tetrahedral and octahedral volumes are re-attached along the newly deformed centrelines (Image 3). This re-stitching yields an uncanny anatomy—an "unfamiliar form" born from a familiar ancestor. Documented through precise orthographic projections (Image 4), the drawing frontier shifts away from the organic, honeycomb mimicry of the original sculpture. Instead, the focus becomes an abstraction of structural orders, flattening depths, and nascent formal tendencies, mapping the precise angles and faces that constitute the new projection frontier. The second phase dresses the skeletal apparatus in an articulate skin, translating the internal logic of the frame into a legible exterior envelope (Image 5).
The orthographic drawings identify latent formal tendencies that are then realized by covering the structure with a thin layer of paper skin printed with rigid grid patterns. Under this shroud, the original structural framework vanishes from view. The skin occupies the recessive voids, mapping the invisible margins of the structure and transforming linear trajectories into enclosed surfaces. This thin boundary is subsequently offset on both sides, inflating into a thick, volumetric envelope - "fat coat" (Image 5). This operation demonstrates a crucial material transcription: the conversion of a structural line into a surface, and the subsequent expansion of that surface into solid volume.
6.“Fat Coat” Section
7.“Fat Coat” Plan
Plans and sections (Images 6, 7) are drafted to illustrate the internal spatial quality of this envelope, mapping the rich edge conditions—such as 45-degree chamfers and inward inclinations—born where the moving surfaces collide. The resulting cut poché wall defines a heavy, protective perimeter that isolates and shapes the interior atmosphere.
8.Front Elevation of Modified “Fat Coat”
9.Back Elevation of Modified “Fat Coat”
The third morphological tier purges the internal chambers of the "fat coat" model to achieve structural and spatial efficiency.
Through a reductive edit of folding and shearing, unnecessary concave and convex volumes are smoothed away, anchoring the volume vertically against the ground plane (Images 8, 9). A dominant square emerges on the front elevation (Image 8)—the geometric signature of the thin skin offset inwardly. The printed grid of the original skin evolves into a diaphanous, meshed screen that wraps the entire mass. Slender structural sticks are inserted into the interstitial void between this mesh screen and the heavy core, suggesting a secondary structural layer that mediates between the exterior veil and the inner mass.
In plan and section (Images 10, 11), the heavy poché walls and their complex junctions are rendered in deep grey. This graphic weight highlights a fundamental spatial contrast: the tension between the dense, compacted solid of the poché and the fluid, semi-enclosed voids trapped between the outer mesh and the inner core.
10.Plan of Modified “Fat Coat”
11.Section of Modified “Fat Coat”
The dialogue between compacted poché and expansive inner void finds its typological resolution in an 8,000-square-foot civic library situated within an urban space in downtown Los Angeles (Image 12). The design synthesizes the monumentality of a Roman Colosseum with the programmatic fluidity of a contemporary repository of knowledge. The entire composition is carved into the earth, creating a submerged "Colosseum of books" where the architecture behaves as an evolving archive.
By absorbing the entire programmatic brief into the poché wall, the center of the library is left entirely clear (Image 13). All civic programs are pulled outward and stacked vertically within the thick perimeter walls, leaving a completely open central atrium. This vast core functions as an open civic stage—an amphitheater heart designed for spontaneous encounters between readers, passersby, and texts. Within this landscape, a system of secondary walls provides temporal stops and spatial dividers, calming human movement and organizing public life.
12.Site Plan
13.Program Diagram
14.First Floor Plan
15.Second Floor Plan
16.Front Elevation
The library is zoned to foster a cheerful, stimulating environment across two primary levels: (1) The Ground Horizon: This lower level anchors the main book collections, a video media center topped by an elevated reading platform, a lecture hall, and a café that bleeds into public gardens (Image 14). (2) The Upper Tier: The library continues upward, where administrative suites, quiet meeting rooms, and a career center sit alongside the elevated book stacks (Image 15).
The building interacts with the city through a grand, sculptural threshold. The outer mesh screen folds upward to welcome pedestrian flow, pulling the public into an intermediary garden before filtering them through a narrow breach in the heavy poché wall (Image 16). The wall operates not as a barrier, but as a mediator, fluidly stitching together simultaneous urban programs, filtering pedestrian movements, and organizing the internal life of the library (Images 17, 18). Through this final synthesis, the project demonstrates how a purely formal exercise in geometric deformation can scale up to become a civic landscape.
17.Sections
18.Sectional Model
19.Axonometric View