NEW LIBRARY

  • Year: 2018
  • Location: Yekaterinburg RU
  • Client: Municipal association of libraries
  • Partner: The July 16th Agency
  • Status: In progress
  • Support: Creative Industries grant

This Project aims at creating a new type of Media Center, with the focus on urban issues, for the city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural region of Russia, where Asian part of the country meets the European.

The Project will be building on the strength of the existing socialist welfare system of public libraries, reactivating one of the unpopular district branches – by means of design, IT, and sociocultural programming – into an alternative public space of exchange and innovative knowledge dissemination.

The Project will draw on the Dutch expertise in spatial transformation, preservation, community building, sociocultural programming, and IT, while at the same time exploring the momentum, when the city’s cultural department declares the readiness to understand the role of the library differently, as a new type of information center.

The Project will address the dramatic lack of public/social/cultural spaces in the otherwise vibrant and quickly developing city of Yekaterinburg. It will also offer a container to accommodate future formats of education.

This new venue will aim at all strata of society and will pay strategic attention to raising of the general public awareness of various urban issues and the importance of Urbanism in the twenty first century.

The new Media Centre is envisioned as a prototype for the transformation of other district libraries in the Ural region (and beyond) and should serve as a pilot project. Project materials will be formatted into a manual for future users.

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