As Above, So Below
La Libreria II began as Dos: A formal character or personality symbolizing two, polarity, duality, and most importantly a synthesis of opposites (see Dyad I).
An urban Villa Rotunda turned DOS' home (threshold), a house of knowledge and culture blowing open a hole in a world of convention and abstraction - firmly embedded. Character and narrative collapse in programmatic composition.
Books: In La Libreria II, the book ascends from a tool of knowledge housed in a library to the status of high-brow art in a museum.
The architecture of La Libreria guides the book's journey as a thing-in-itself through its hybrid library-museum programming. As the book journeys upward it becomes increasingly abstracted from an object of information to an object of contemplation. There's value in the book as an educational tool, but its value is transformed or exchanged for another kind of value when it transitions into decoration and even further as an object solely of contemplation - placed on a pedestal in the museum as an artifact or relic ascending the heights of literary history and quite literally elevating the book into a position of cultural power. The book comes full circle: knowledge is power.
Unified discontinuities: The book sheds parts of itself (its capacity to bear knowledge) while retaining and adding other qualities (becoming decorative) in order to architecturally tie distinct spaces together. The book morphs into an architectural unit unto itself, not unlike the brick, but serving simultaneously a decorative and educational purpose. The book's metamorphosis is reflected in the transformation of building form and function from one thing into something of an opposite - two counteracting forces, spaces, and things, below and above, library and museum, tool and objet d'art - as complementary parts embodied in a dyad.