PRELIMINARY STUDIES

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The Preliminary Studies is a preparatory assignment that focuses on investigating basic notions of the city, and learning from examples of community library around the world. This assignment aims to firstly introduce students to the basics in urban design and its relation to architecture, and secondly, studying and determining the programmatic function, societal role and spatial layout of a community library and architectural responses for urban infills.

The Preliminary Studies comprises of three components: Site Documentation, Site Analysis, and Precedent Studies of Urban Infills and Community Library. The Site Documentation and Site Analysis will equip us with a firm understanding of the site they will be working with this semester, while the Precedent Studies will provide an insight into architectural responses for designing an urban infill community library.

The outcome of the Preliminary Studies will include the production of site documentation materials (drawings and models in both digital and physical copy for further use), a comprehensive analysis of the site, and a detailed case study of a relevant urban infill and community library.

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The site context is Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. There is a real life scenario to establish the possibilities for a Community Library to connect to the urban community, the young adults as being the user-group. The studio project is collaborative with POW Ideas on one such scenarios on Jalan TAR.

The major issue being the fading of cultural heritage that engages the local communities. The contemporary trend is to fade this rich cultural heritage rather than amplifying it. The solution is in design employing critical approach to the notion of ‘content’ as a purposeful narrative to powerful questions relevant to the context (Low, 2010).

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To begin with, the question is:

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What are the possibilities for the community library to connect to the young urban community at the street scale?