The way the building functions makes me think about the image I have about an ancient Roman basilica where everybody could enter and accommodate freely. Here indeed everyone gets the possibility to read the magazines for free and to study in private. But the building is as much about education as it is about social interaction. The architecture enables a lot of visual contact between people. Many parts of the interior are structured in a thoughtful way to form cascades where people accommodate themselves and can observe the environment around them. This situation has something in common with how foyers of theaters used to be shaped. The idea for social interaction was for everyone "to see and to be seen". The theater piece was only part of the show, equally important if not even more was the part of the social life that was happening everywhere between the lines, before and after the play. Now, when peeping secretly into the screens of others you discover that most of the activity that is happening there is either mail, chat or facebook!
Did observations similar to these bring Johan Huizinga to the development of the idea of the "homo ludens"? According to that a human being is a social entity for whom the play factor has been the most important social bond in social history. To be precise - Homo Ludens examined the role of play in law, war, science, poetry, philosophy, and art. Huizinga saw the instinct for play as the central element in human culture - all human activities are playing: "Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play".
Maybe it doesn't matter any more what a public building is specifically until it is public? Maybe the same principles should be employed when designing a public library, a shopping mall and even a museum? Each time a different proportion of ingredients should be added but the stock should be composed of main factor of play. It's interesting how boundaries are waning, everything is becoming one, a mixed use sewed together with invisible but efficient forces just in the same way as the music the spaces of the Library and connects all the floors and nooks.
The piano in the hall way provokes social interaction also in very prosaic way. Once, just in front of my eyes a scene took place when the piano player was almost punched. Wrong piece? He played Phillipe Glass. Wrong audience? The music "lover" was a bit drunk already and by coincidence turned out to be my compatriot. Maybe what could help would be an inscription "Don't shoot the piano player" as we know it from saloons in the Wild West? This West surely remains wild for some of us.
I want to learn to play piano so badly. It is of course not about any groundbreaking talent that has been asleep within me until now and it is not about ever getting to the main stage. It is about playing one day a short entertaining piece for everyone at the doorstep of the library.
Building highlights:
http://www.jocoenen.com/
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