living room

Columbia GSAPP Core II | Spring 2019
Studio Critic: Erica Goetz

The Living Room is a library for storytelling, situated in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, where the intersection of Asian/Asian-American, African American, LatinX, and queer communities culminate. The purpose of the library is to share and document the under-represented and forgotten histories of the community: oral histories, unpublished written histories, cultural artifacts/sounds etc.

The program of the Living Room revolves around the intersecting programs of a reading rooms and storytelling studios, further qualified as spaces of learning and experience, respectively. Four large spaces encompass the learning zones: a main reading room, a children’s reading room, an artifact archive, and a theater. The moments in which these zones intersect become the experience spaces: Story Loft, Art Studio, Documentation Studio, Recording Studio. The connection between these two programs bridge through a third space, manifested through the porous openings pulled out from the heart of the building form to open up physically and visually to the city and park. These spaces act as the connecting wall between learning and experience, but also between library and the greater city.