The Launch
This “ideas” studio promotes ideas, conceptual design, and vision. Energetic, focused, it welcomes innovation and compelling design expression. We take our studies through a “launch stage”— that moment when architectural thinking transforms from conceptualization into a future direction.
The semester explores how architects construct this launch: how we identify potential, respond to program. frame ideas, and communicate a compelling and capable vision.
As our focus, we explore new programs and identities for three libraries, each remarkable, each in search of new services, broader audiences, and reimagined design expression. Our work creates a platform for their success. We will engage with stakeholders, articulating our ideas, promoting discourse, assembling a portfolio of work useful to the library, and to each student’s emerging professional outreach.
Our goal is to build compelling, persuasive design visions that support a vibrant and urgently needed future for the library, establishing a pathway to a successful project.
Our libraries are exceptional–in Newark NJ: The Newark Public Library; in Chicago: the Newberry Library; and in Minneapolis: the University of Minnesota’s Wilson Library. Each offers different settings, design, mission and constituents.
Our opportunities include expansions, renovations, and urban design, offering new library services with spaces—external and internal– for highly innovative programs.
our vision “launch “and articulation is central to the studio process. Our well founded ideas, innovative conceptual design, and our visualizations are the “launch” and platform these libraries need.
Why focus on a launch?
Why focus on launching vision and communications? Why not have a full design for one library throughout the entire semester?
In practice, architects rarely begin with unlimited time or complete information.
Rather, our work often begins in moments of acceleration – when an idea must be articulated with conviction, to set a responsible course and developed with clear approachable communication. Through critical thinking and iterative design articulation, this studio will treat the launch not just as a preliminary step, but as a complete and rigorous design act.
The grounds for this investigation are three highly valued libraries (public, research, and academic), an institutional typology facing its own set of challenges. How might we address the changing role of these library types as social, cultural, and intellectual landscapes continue to shift away from their 19th century expansion? Libraries today must navigate the need for spaces to be adaptable and dynamic, diversifying material collections, social roles within the community or campus, and emerging technological advances.
Our sites:
We will reimagine three distinct sites: the Newark Public Library in Newark NJ, the Newberry Library in Chicago IL, and the University of Minnesota Wilson Library in Minneapolis MI, three vastly different urban spatial conditions, programs, and constituents.
We will visit each site and meet with its leadership to understand institutional goals and community needs firsthand.
Across these contexts, our design opportunities are new additions, renovations, urban design, new library services, and spaces for highly innovative programs. The “launch” for each project will be articulated through persuasive, well-founded ideas, communicated clearly through both design and writing.
Students will design proposals that operate—and fulfill– at the level of vision: establishing conceptual frameworks, programmatic strategies, and communicative tools that articulate a persuasive case for a continued architectural direction. They will develop and document three conceptual designs, each exploring these sites, typologies, and programs that extend, reimagine, and empower the library.
As the semester concludes, each student will have the opportunity to return to one selected project for further exploration and refinement. At the end, the work will be consolidated into a single comprehensive document, a graphic “sketchbook,” a compiling a portfolio of the opportunities.
Site details:
Three related but differentiated library typologies and site conditions include:
Site One: Downtown Newark
The Newark Public Library, located downtown, serving a diverse population in a rapidly changing urban setting, is an aging institution that offers extensive community services, and has significant adjacent site for expansion.
The Newark Library project will explore expansion of an empty parking lot, offering new access and visibility, added library services, commercial uses, entrepreneurship/incubator resources, and affordable and market-rate housing. This will be a mixed-use project, likely a midrise or taller. Its companionship and differentiation with the historic library is a particular opportunity.
Site Two: Chicago
The Newberry Library, a 200,000 gsf 1883 landmark, many times expanded and renovated, supports research, exhibits, historic special collections, and workplace.
A full floor of the Newberry building is eager for new initiatives, including public programs, changing exhibitions, program and seminar space, and areas for collaborative academic research.
Newberry also offers an urban design opportunity: redesigning its parking and operations, and a neglected open site adjacent to a successfully revitalized city park. This is an opportunity to transform the open lot for unique events, book sales, community open space, improved operations, and below grade library expansion. Coupled with new public exhibits, this renewed civic space can fortify public access and invitation.
Site Three: Minneapolis–The University of Minnesota campus
The Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota is the central university library.
A modernist/brutalist structure of five floors, it is located in a campus precinct of similar vintage, within the university’s -“West Bank”.
Wilson offers a “fortress modernism”, with an urgent need for a new entry and more welcoming identity, new collaborative study spaces, an auditorium/forum for both library and UMN campus programs. Library staff have requested reception and hospitality spaces—coffee areas, lockers, exhibits, lounges, team workspace, program areas, concentrated on the Library’s main floor and concourse. Wilson’s “main street” project offers the potential for a transformational intervention.
PROGRAMMING
Each library will have an assigned program, with substantial connectivity between each, allowing threads of exploration to emerge across all sites.
The space-use program, including assignable square footage and special requirements, will be provided for each site; however studio members are welcome to revise or rethink the program as they see best.
Programs will address requirements for expanded library services, gathering, research and study areas, retail components, special events, hospitality, housing, cultural facilities, and spaces for community services or commercial uses.
THE STUDIO PROCESS
We focus on conceptual design, ideas, responses, and decision making. All projects will advance through concept/early schematic design, including diagrams, design studies, vignettes, program resolution, and short project statements that underscore the core design approach and clarify the proposed initiatives.
In the final weeks, one project and site (student’s choice) can be selected for more detailed study.
Writing and graphic communication are developed in parallel.
Clear and concise oral and written communication will convey each project’s premise, and anticipated design evolution, and be incorporated into the final sketchbooks.
PACE AND STRUCTURE
The pace—three concepts within one studio semester– models the structure of design competitions, which often allow only a few weeks to articulate a design approach, a program response, and an engaging narrative through design communication.
Typically, we will move from one project to the next in a matter of weeks. By midterm, programs, prototypes, and precedents, analysis of the sites in relation to the city and the community, and initial design ideas will be underway, but still in process. Midterm reviews will focus on the concept designs for the Newark and Newberry Libraries.
Final reviews will examine all, and present a comprehensive “sketchbook” compiling all three projects, as a portfolio of the semester’s work.
TRAVEL WEEK
Travel week and a travel day will take us to cities where architecture has created a complex and evolving urban and campus fabric. Newark, Chicago, and Minneapolis are places where design and heritage, matters.
First, we will visit Newark on a Saturday day-trip, before travel week.
Our travel week will include Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. Three heartland cities with incomparable civic and cultural resources from every era. Their libraries stand among their finest historic and modern structures.
The itinerary includes our studio sites, workshops with their representatives, and meetings and tours with urban leaders, leading architects, library precedents, and explorations of buildings by visionary architects, with exceptional clients.
In Chicago, we will see John Ronan’s Poetry Foundation, works by Frank Lloyd Wright and the exemplary public private library program that pairs new housing with new branch libraries, each designed by prominent architects. The Chicago Architecture Foundation has offered its conference room and exhibition space for our workshops.
We will visit Racine, Wisconsin to study the pioneering workplace and early “maker space“ that Frank Lloyd Wright created for Johnson Wax between 1939 and 1950. In Milwaukee, we will explore two generations of civic architecture by Santiago Calatrava and Marcel Breuer. Finally, in Minneapolis, we will visit works by Herzog and de Meuron, the highly regarded Central Library by Cesar Pelli, the Arvonne Fraser Library by Ralph Rapson, and conclude the trip with a tour of Breuer’s Saint John’s Abbey outside Minneapolis, and an overnight stay at its guesthouse.