"Micro-library" (its area is 160 m2) is located in the Indonesian city of Bandung, the third most populous in the country. The authors of the project, the Shau bureau, wanted to create a free educational center where residents of the Kampung district could read books, listen to lectures and generally gain new knowledge. On the other hand, it was important to provide the local population with a space for meetings, a kind of "point of attraction". For this purpose, a site was chosen for the construction of the library, where the residents of the region are accustomed to holding holidays, meetings, sports games. At the same time, the architects decided not to remove the existing scene, but included it in the structure of the library building as a stylobate for the "floating" volume. Note that this year the project was awarded the Architizer A + Awards in the Society + Architecture category by the decision of the jury and the audience.
The most notable detail of the Microlibrary project was the façade made of empty ice cream containers: about 2,000 containers (some of which had their bottoms cut out) were fixed along the perimeter of the second level between steel slats. As the Shau architects explain, the choice of the material is dictated by its cheapness and environmental considerations. Slots in plastic buckets provide natural light and ventilation in the room. The containers themselves are fixed at an angle so that rainwater does not flow into them.
The order of placement of intact and punctured containers is not accidental: the phrase Buku adalah jendela dunia is represented on the facade in the form of a binary code - from Indonesian it can be translated as “Books are a window to the world”. Mayor of Bandung suggested placing these words
Ridvan Kamil. By the way, he is an architect by education and the founder of his own bureau.
Otherwise, during the construction of Microlibrary, the simplest and most affordable materials were also used: horizontal and vertical supports are metal I-beams, the floor and roof are concrete slabs.
The Bandung Library is a pilot project that kicked off a massive program to create a series of similar centers throughout Indonesia. The program aims to combat rising illiteracy rates and to revive interest in reading.
