GWANGJU LIBRARY

The Gwangju Library is a proposal for the design/build international architecture competition in Gwangju, South Korea. The proposal was designed by Tiago Costa and Ana Coelho during the course of two months and submitted in February of 2020. The building’s concept is derived from the New Essentialism theory currently being developed by Tiago Costa within his academic research. It’s a four steps concept that its main goal is to be used as an architects tool to achieve architecture’s essence in contemporary design. Our proposal’s goal was for the library to become a light harvesting collector in the “Province of Light” so that it would create the right mood, behavior, feeling, emotion onto the library’s users. These properties were to be cherished and preserved within the pure materiality of its honest materials such as concrete, wood and glass. This new container of people was to be an answer to the community’s eager necessity of a common gathering space that was not only a library but a vessel of knowledge.