Brooklyn Waterfront Library

headshot of a man with dark hair and glasses
  • Jordan Berta, M.Arch. 2016
  • Class

    ARCH 5114 Core Design Studio IV: Integrated Design Practice
  • Instructor

    Visiting Critic Martin Cox
    Visiting Critic Timothy Bade
    Visiting Critic Jane Stageburg

The Brooklyn Waterfront Library is an examination of the grid, the cell, and the figure. Beginning from completing the existing infill corner at Kent and 7th Avenues on the Williamsburg waterfront, a diagrammatic grid emerged to establish a very clear framework. Initial work engaged the subdivision of the grid volumetrically. Eventually, a language was engaged which considered the grid as semivoid, the patri masses which had so strongly shaped the diagram became areas of movement and circulation.

Furniture and books were carved away in their cellular units from a mass density to establish a path which traverses this framework, enabled by a structural parasol expression. The ambition for this contemporary library is to identify and repurpose a contextual expression from the bottom-up, while embedding current library priorities of malleability and free open space, light, and air.

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