A shelf in the landscape
The brief asked for a summer reading room the city could unlock in April and forget about until October. We answered with a single gesture: one long shelf, folded three times, that becomes in turn a bench, a roof and a wall of books.
The pavilion sits on six screw piles and touches the park nowhere else. Every joint is dry — bolted larch, no glue, no concrete — so the building can leave the meadow as quietly as it arrived.
Reading as a public act
Libraries indoors ask for silence. Outdoors, the contract loosens: children negotiate picture books, someone reads match reports aloud, a student sleeps under an open dictionary. The folded shelf shapes three rooms with three volumes of privacy, and the city's librarians restock it with a bicycle trailer.
- 1,400 books on loan, no card required
- 62 linear metres of shelf, of which 19 are bench
- zero fixings into the ground plane
The city asked us what happens when books get wet. They dry, mostly.