Typology- Institutional/ Interiors /Refurbishment

Location:-Khirkee extension, Delhi, India

Built Area : 1800 sqft

Completion Year: December 2020

Owner: TCLP -https://www.thecommunitylibraryproject.org/

Civil contractor/furniture : Thakur Enterprises

Design team- Shaily Gupta, Pratyush Gupta, Joy zenhinsang

Project Description

The Community Library Project (TCLP) engaged sga-studio to fulfil a design brief to create a space that exalts books by exalting the readers through whom books reveal their meaning. The free library serving over 2400 first-generation school goers had been evicted from its previous location. TCLP wished sga-studio to design a welcoming library composed of modular units which could be packed up and moved, and all within a minimal budget.

The sga-studio team took it upon themselves to design everything – doors, tables, partitions, reception kiosk and shelves – with two elements: industrial GMS slotted angle and recycled wooden slats. It was a challenge, and a constraint but also an aesthetical exploration of materials.

The site identified for the project was an abandoned dumping ground for area garbage, vandalized repeatedly over the previous fifteen years. The design and implementation was carried out even as a pandemic raged. Upon fulfillment, the design has proven to be one that suggests both open expansive engagement by individuals and collective engagement by the community of which they are a part.

The entry leads to a courtyard which offers a low stage for public arts-based engagement; a scattering of fixed brick seating, a meandering tile pathway and the suggestion of a future garden nod to a vision of an engaged community of readers.

The cavernous 1800 square foot interior houses shelves that can accommodate 10,000 books. Tall shelves divide zones from one another – a zone for children leads to one for young adults and then finally a zone for adults, laying for the new reader the path they will follow to enter lifelong engagement with books. Four golden pendant lamps light the central aisle created by shelves, a literal expression of this lifelong path.

The various zones in the library also demarcate open area seating from an enclosed area where silence can allow for deeper individual engagement with reading. Low hexagonal tables in the open area allow members to engage in read-alouds of favourite books. Shelves on caster wheels can be pushed aside to open the space for film screenings or poetry evenings. Alternate rows of shelves are made without backing to allow members to peep through.

At the entrance, the circulation desk, often a forbidding seat of power is rendered familiar to young library members in its resemblance to the street-side kiosks in which many of their parents work in nearby market spaces. It communicates a simple message: the library belongs to its members, as there is no false division of their life outside the library from their life inside the library.