Public Thresholds Experimenting with Public Value Creation through Spatial Interventions in Public Buildings

Public Thresholds

Public Buildings are public space condensations traditionally conceptualized in binary perspectives: public-private, indoor-outdoor, accessible-restricted. Nevertheless, the complexity of social, political and economical structures deems such definition dated. Public Buildings are dynamic thresholds that change with the flow of publicity. A threshold is “a point […] above which something is true or will take place and below which it is not or will not” 1⁠. Therefore public buildings are thresholds defined by the point–or limen– at which individuals become “the public” to undertake collective action and also the point at which the momentary belonging swarm disintegrates into individuals 2(Fig.1 & 3).

Public Buildings, as public space, are produced socially by a class and power conflict 3⁠. This conflict is not static but changes according to the public condition. Individuals of different backgrounds come together momentarily to collectively act, whether watch a theatre play or debate the future of their neighbourhood. During that period of time, they re-define their shared cultural values of beauty, identity, belonging or democracy. Public buildings can be the tool enabling civic connections by enhancing social interaction if allowing for flexible use and facilitating technical adaptation to changing conditions.

Cultural value creation

Understanding public buildings as evolving structures has consequences in the way they are conceived and designed. Cultural public buildings –those related to collective and common human practices such as libraries, museums, civic centres, religious centres or even schools– are the paradigm of cultural value creation. They exist to host the birth and proliferation of cultural practices that through interaction and conflict eventually become cultural values. In recent late modernity, architectural practice’s success was defined by the amount and impact of its cultural building’s designs. Buildings have been designed as global and interchangeable representations of modernity: Museums in China that could have been libraries in the US or Theatres in Switzerland that could become Casinos in Thailand. Cultural buildings became consumer products shaping local and national identities. Nevertheless, the lack of connection with their immediate visible and invisible agents and ecologies limited their intended effect on the public sphere that is the creation of cultural values. It also produced negative reactions such as gentrification or urban discomfort. Public buildings aiming to contribute positively to the construction of the public sphere must be designed as open-ended processes embracing their conflictive nature, their spatial agency as actors of a complex ecology and their reason of being: facilitating through technical solutions the union of individuals to form a collective through a common activity (Fig.2). Cultural public buildings are then the physical translation of a collective interest turning the tacit and explicit structures into affordances and possibilities that host civic relationships.

As cultural public buildings, libraries are a representation of a specific civilization and embody the values and aspirations of their immediate and extensive community. In late modernity, not only are external reference points changing but there is also a continuous process of “self-actualization” or “life politics” as Anthony Giddens articulates it. Individuals “who using their own resources try to change the course of their own life” 4⁠. From a time when our life was defined by solid references (religion, profession, family) we shifted towards a situation where the definition of the self is completely dependent on the individual’s capability to continuously improve oneself. In this context of liquifying institutions and reflexive exploration of the self is where Makerspaces emerge as a space for belonging to counteract alienating modern existence.

Makerlabs: experimenting with makerspaces in libraries

Democratization of knowledge has turned citizens into prosumers: producers and consumers. These terms not only refer to an economic exchange but also a change of roles in cultural institutions. Prosumerism has turned cultural institutions, from which also libraries, into performative spaces 5⁠. In these spaces, users are expected to engage with the available tools and engage in co-creation. Makerspaces in libraries are a great example of performative spaces because of their critical role in repurposing spaces for literacy. Whether focused on creativity or innovation, makerspaces in libraries share the goal of enlarging literacy beyond books.

The challenge of transforming libraries’s civic role is one of programmatic and spatial magnitude. On the one hand, new functions demand different activities, themes and ways of doing. On the other, giving new meanings to traditional building functions requires original design concepts and methods. The objective of the Makerlabs project is to demonstrate how a design intervention in an existing public library can activate the building’s agency in the public sphere, motivate use and human interaction and therefore produce cultural value dynamics in and around the makerspace.

The Makerlab project is a collaboration between the Royal Library of the Netherlands, Delft University of Technology, Hogeschool Rotterdam and 4 pilot libraries in each of the two one-year cycles. The project departs from a co-creation process with libraries representatives, users and making experts clarifying the themes and cultural values of each makerspace. Later the PhD candidate translates the received input into a design blueprint where the functions and spatial gestures are presented. In that phase, Industrial Design students take over the given blueprint to design products or experiences that enhance the designed value-spatial framework. The last phase of this design experiment is to integrate the programmatic, spatial and objectual input into a spatial intervention to be built in the library (Fig.4).

As the first case study of this Design Driven Doctorate, the project serves to prove a discursive methodology where there is a continuous back and forth between theory and practice, thinking and doing, words and drawings. Instead of following a linear approach, the research is designed to develop literature review and design premises simultaneously to maximise their synergy (Fig. 3). For example, designing the indoor-outdoor connection of the makerspace will bring the focus to what are the conditions of spatial publicity. Inversely, reading about Spinoza’s contributions to architecture leads to discovering designs such as the Fun Palace. The experiments will consist of a three-step testing process: designing, executing and reflecting on the intervention. Ultimately, the Makerlabs experiments will prove by design the importance of spatial aspects in the establishment of new cultural value dynamics in existing public buildings.