Maryam Haghshenaslari

A Library for Unwritten Stories: An Architecture for Unscripted Exchange

This thesis was motivated by my fascination with public libraries, where all orientations of knowledge are accepted, all aspects of thought are welcome, and all the daring of the imagination is encouraged. Where the classics and the avant-garde, women and men, the young and the old coexist. Indeed, “it is the house of all.”1

In the 21st century, libraries faced different changes in terms of forms and configuration. With the spread of digital resources, the public now has access to contents of international libraries. There are blurring boundaries between public space and modern libraries.

In this thesis, I envision libraries as a collection of meeting spaces where people can share their ideas and experiences and informally pass knowledge from one person to another. This thesis explores the library as a social hub, a public space for interpersonal communication, and a collection of spaces-of-exchange, which respond to the human desire for embodied assembly. A library that aims at building a peaceful community by bringing people together through sharing and collaboration.

In this regard, I focused on “storytelling” as an example of a collective activity, and “oral history” as a means of collecting and preserving people’s stories.

The intention of this project is to create a facility in order to collect, tell and preserve stories of individuals, as well as stories that are originally passed among generations through oral traditions. This project not only presents spaces where storytelling events can be held, but also envisions spaces with different scales and levels of intimacy that support human collectivity in various forms.

1. Miquel Adria and Felipe Garrido and Marco Bassols and Pablo Frost,  Biblioteca Vasconcelos Library, Editorial RM Mexico, 2007, pp. 01