PROFESSOR

JONATHAN RULE

STUDIO

BEYOND BOOKS

Libraries are much more than books. They are social spaces and cornerstones of communities. Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist/philanthropist who helped establish over 3000 libraries across the United States, believed libraries to be the ‘palace of the people’. A space that would enable individuals to reach their full potential through the resources they offered. While Carnegie referred to the intellectual material that books provided, today's libraries have had to adapt to a society beyond books.

The Beyond Books Studio revisits the contents of the library as a changing institution and its necessity for alternative borrowed objects in the community. The image of the stacks, endless rows of printed knowledge, is but a poster child for what these spaces hold. Community based media and fab labs have begun to fill a needed void. Open to the public, they provide equitable access to the tools, knowledge, and the financial means to educate, innovate and invent using a wide range of resources. Libraries too have begun to incorporate these non traditional assets into their collections, a necessary step to maintain their relevance in the community.

This section invites students to propose an extension to Ann Arbor’s Downtown Library location that responds to a constantly changing world beyond books. The studio’s proposals speculate on the future of spatial needs for a multifacited society working and educating in a myriad of ways.

︎︎︎BACK ︎

JULIA MCMORROUGH

Elliot Smithberger

Ruiying Zhang

MATIAS DEL CAMPO

Dowdle, Ibrahim, Zhang Fahmy, Kamhawi, Pandey

IAN DONALDSON

Gort-Cabeza de Vaca
Anahita Mojahed

DAWN GILPIN

Sang Won Kang
Xin Li

PETER HALQUIST

Chung-Han (Joanne)

Chengdai Yang

PERRY KULPER

Ghassan Alserayhi
Eilís Finnegan

ANN LUI

Will Kirsch
Kendra Soler

STEVEN MANKOUCHE

Stephen Corcoran
Aric Reed

NEAL ROBINSON

Connor Tuthill

Eduardo Villamor

JON RULE

Richard Hua
Qianwei Zhang

CHRISTIAN UNVERZAGT

Siyuan (Elaine) Cheng
Vance Smith Jr

KATHY VELIKOV

Emma Powers
Brian Smith

STUDENT WORK

QIANWEI ZHANG

“THE LIBRARY
OF TOYS”

The design aims to create a toy library adjacent to the old library where kids and young people can borrow toys and have fun. The main reason why we need a toy library is that Ann Arbor is a city with a great population of young people and students. Besides, the sharing of toys has great benefits in terms of sustainability, lowering family budget, and encouraging communication between kids. The library is a colorful space with different small boxes of play and exhibition space inserted within a large volume. And kids can run around rooms of different hight and scale and enrich their imagination in this distinctive space of games and toys.