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Seoul Office of Education Library

Instead of using the conventional classification system of titles, art historian Aby Warburg created his library with the concept of 'The Law of the Good Neighbours'. He would deliberately put together seemingly irrelevant books on various subjects that could be 'good neighbours '.

This was to stimulate readers to draw their own imagination through unexpected discoveries and association of the variety of subjects. In a similar vein, our ambition is to imbue the spirit of ‘good neighbour’ in the library and steer away from a rigid system of order. Instead, a library should encourage intergenerational exchange and cross-disciplinary pollination of ideas.

This proposal is a 'neighbourhood' of information and knowledge - Library of Neighbours. Architecturally, Gaepo Library sits adjacent to the neighbouring beautiful natural environment. Programmatically, we deliberately avoided the conventional library configuration of ‘stacking’, where subjects and ages are manifested in isolated floor levels. Instead, the community, youth and children sections of the library are compressed into a vast single and fluid floor plane. By carefully arranging the various reading spaces adjacent to one another, we want to provide fertile breeding ground for accidental discoveries and exchange between ages and disciplines.



Black Square and Red Square, Kazmir Malevich (1915)





LOCATION
Seoul, South Korea

STATUS
Competition - Finalist

BUILDING AREA
13,606 m2