Studio in Critical Practice
2015
Critic: Scott Sorli / Arthur Wrigglesworth
The concept behind the project arose after reading Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, where he discusses the grave challenges facing humanity, and our acceleration towards destruction in the carbon economy. Despite this awareness and our technological capacity to mitigate this problem, the current sustainable strategies are positioned in a way that still lets us have everything that we want, without the recognition that if we want to change the current state of the world, we have to fundamentally change the way that we live.
When we look to our transhistorical origins, knowledge has always been intrinsically linked to the ecstasy of freedom and the experience of the sacred, but this connection has been lost over time.
Today, it is defined as:
Knowledge (Merriam-Webster): Information, understanding, or skill that you get from experience or information.
The project illustrates the relationship between knowledge and the human race, by utilizing the Robarts Library as a time-travelling double agent. The library becomes a symbol of cultural knowledge that lives through humanity’s existence, while also exemplifying architectural resilience through time. The concept of institution, program, even human habitation, are conceived as temporary visitors to the overall lifespan of buildings.