MCLC: Innovative library

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Innovative library
Source: NYT (7/6/15)
An Innovative Library Lifts the Fortunes of a Chinese Town
By JANE PERLEZ
JIAOJIEHE, China — Nestled among the shimmering chestnut, walnut and peach trees of a deep valley surrounded by craggy hills, the tiny village of Jiaojiehe suffers from being close to the nation’s capital. The young flee easily to the big city, leaving the elderly behind, lonely and poor.
In today’s China, villages like this often try to engineer a sense of well-being by opening a new medical clinic, say, or by upgrading the water supply.
But Li Xiaodong, an award-winning architect who fuses traditional Chinese ideas of design with Western themes, had a different idea for Jiaojiehe. He was captivated by the potential he saw in the village’s most abundant natural resource, the branches of its thousands of trees, which the locals harvest for fuel.
So he built a library — with a twist. At its base, it is a steel and glass box in the vein of a Philip Johnson open-plan creation from the 1950s, but its exterior walls and roof are clad with fruit-tree twigs.
The spindly sticks are arranged in vertical rows, and their uneven shapes allow natural light to filter into the library’s reading room, while keeping the building cool in the summer and cozy in the winter. They also act as a kind of camouflage, making the library’s rectangular edges barely noticeable in the landscape as visitors approach the village on a narrow, twisting road.
The interior of the Liyuan library is basically just one large, casual room, lined with open bookshelves and an eclectic collection of works that include President Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope,” “Forrest Gump” and traditional Chinese novels about the Qing dynasty. There are no chairs or desks, just a polished wood floor with several elevated platforms where readers can lounge with their books.
Meeting the reading needs of the roughly 50 households that remain in the village is something of a sideline, though. What the building is mainly meant to be is a magnet for day-trippers from Beijing, eager to escape the city’s perpetual smog and dirt for a bit of beauty and calm.
“The library is a tool to attract people to the village,” said Mr. Li, a professor of architecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
When visitors come to see the library, he said, they also spend money at the village’s few restaurants, pay parking fees and donate money for the building’s upkeep.
“The place is special,” said Li Wenli, 45, an insurance saleswoman from Beijing who sat in a corner of the reading room with a large book balanced on her knees as her 9-year-old son read along with her.
“In the city, a library seems to be unnaturally quiet,” she said. “You think: ‘I need to stay quiet because everybody else is quiet.’ But here, the peace is natural.”
The library has a presence on social media, and many of the visitors on the weekend are university students or young professionals. They wander around the village, snap photos of themselves and order the local delicacy, stewed chicken with chestnuts, at one of the restaurants.
And some of them actually read. Sun Liyang, 27, an automotive journalist, said a friend in Beijing had donated some books after hearing about the library online, and he decided to come for a look. “I am sitting here reading ‘The Adventures of Tintin,’ ” he said. “It’s taking me back to my childhood.”
Wang Fuying, 57, who used to grow crops in the area, is now the librarian, even though she can barely read. “All the library visitors are from the city,” she said. “We have up to 200 visitors a day over the weekend. They come for fun, take a look, take some pictures and take a walk.”
There are a few flaws. To preserve the wood floor, patrons must remove their shoes at the front door, but in the summer when there are many visitors, the reading room becomes smelly from all the socks, Ms. Wang said. The wood-burning fireplace looks like an inviting place for winter reading, but it was placed too close to the windows and has proved to be unusable.
But those are small things compared with the good the building has done for the village. Its two small restaurants “would have closed without the visitors,” Ms. Wang said.
Mr. Li, the architect, who is 52, graduated from Tsinghua University in 1984, in one of the first classes of young designers to emerge after the disaster of the Cultural Revolution. He went to the Netherlands to study the history and theory of site planning, received a doctorate in 1994 and taught in Singapore before returning to join the faculty of the lively architecture school at Tsinghua.
There he refines ideas that he said were influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, and are based on the tenet that buildings should be integral parts of the landscape and not objects placed in it.
“Chinese architecture is always drawn from a bird’s-eye view, never from the human eye,” he said. “We always think of architecture as one piece. We don’t see the human as detached from the environment.”
Mr. Li’s projects in other parts of China where he has built small structures in rural areas — including a school built high over a creek — have won many prizes. But few honors seem to have pleased him more than last year’s Moriyama R.A.I.C. International Prize, named for the Canadian-Japanese architect Raymond Moriyama. It honors projects that are “transformative, inspired as well as inspiring, and emblematic of the human values of respect and inclusiveness.”
On a recent weekend, Mr. Moriyama, 85, was one of the visitors to the library. He liked what he saw. “I was so happy this particular project won,” he said. “It was all about picking one that represents service to the people. The sense of humanity of the library is so great.”
The older architect patted Mr. Li on the back. “You did good,” he said. “I was not on the jury, and quite often, I disagree with the jury. But in this case, I believe it was 150 percent right.”
by denton.2 at osu.edu on July 7, 2015
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