Public Library in Baião / Traço Alternativo Arquitectos Associados
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Public Library in Baião / Traço Alternativo Arquitectos Associados
Text description provided by the architects. The land of the new Municipal Library of Baião faces to the south with Av. April 25 and offers views of the landscape to the north.
There, was a small building, stripped of its original function, which had two floors: one facing the avenue and the other about 2.50m below it.
The pre-existing building was a primary school of utter importance for the city. Having been built around 1940 during the Estado Novo period, it was the intention of the municipality to preserve the memory of this small piece of equipment where so many generations have studied.
The intervention proposal went through with the premise of rehabilitating and integrating the existing building and adding to it a new volume with three floors.
This solution allowed having wide glass windows facing North, taking advantage of the natural light that would this way enter generously, allowing ideal reading conditions.
It seemed to make sense that the main entrance of the library should be made through the old entrance of the primary school, almost as a way of honoring the past generations, in some way bringing the past to the present and projecting it into the future. The new generations would follow the previous generations and would also come here to acquire knowledge.
The main entrance gives access to the lobby of the Library.
There is a second entrance to the equipment, through a covered side ramp, allowing access to people with reduced mobility which gives room to a second atrium that functions as a small exhibition hall and, simultaneously, serves as a support space for the events to be held in the auditorium and in the training room. This alternative entrance adds versatility to the building, allowing it to have other uses when the library is closed, promoting and enabling the most diverse uses including cultural events. This building aims to be a space for the arts, of culture. A place where people can meet and socialize.
The core of vertical access allows passage to the upper floor, to the adults’ section, where visitors and users can watch the horizon and the silhouette of the mountains, leading us on a journey into the imagination of the book “The City and the Mountains” of Eça de Queiroz, written precisely about this untamed landscape. Going down to the lower floor we can find a warehouse to store documents, the internal service spaces, and the children’s section, which opens to the garden, which articulates with the inside to enable various educational activities.
The project tried to merge the two bodies in order to form a single entity, and this is achieved through some formal and functional commitment and through the use of the same materials inside and outside of the two volumes. Thus, the two bodies, although distant in time, seek the possible dialogue through volumetry, but also through materiality. They contrast without being contrasting.
Like the people who inhabit this region, who are extremely open, welcoming, and transparent, the building was designed, with large windows and lots of light.
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