4,000 years ago, before screens, before print, we told stories through performance. The library must resurrect communal rituals of reading and writing. This project proposes a new public forum for writing and exchanging ideas, one that mandates the presence of a body to read and write. ‘Bodies’ of knowledge are constructed in this assembly facility, large-scale tools for reading and writing as a community. The library becomes a sandbox. Several times every year, an object moves out of the library and onto the adjacent public causeway in Zuidas. The tool slowly moves down the causeway to the nearby Station Square, where it rests while the citizens of Zuidas speak to the tool. After a month, sometime after sunset, the tool speaks back. Each tool has its own voice, its own writing performance. The tool inscribes their stories into the square.
The people of Zuidas gather in the square to read together. The stories fade over time, to make room for new ones. The people of Zuidas line the causeway to watch the tool return to the library. The guilds of the library disassemble the tool. Some pieces are reused for other tools, some pieces are stored in the sand.
Amsterdam, Netherlands - Fall 2018
Students: Kevin Marblestone
Instructors: Florian Idenburg
