[Built] Competition - First Prize
Location: Tainan, Taiwan
Project Team: Kwantak AUYEUNG, Jin-de HSU (SD/DD/CD), Dong-long WU (CA)
Total Floor Area: 3144 m2
Project year: 2008-2012
Photographer: Yu-Chen ZAO, Guei-Shiang Ke
Location: Tainan, Taiwan
Project Team: Kwantak AUYEUNG, Jin-de HSU (SD/DD/CD), Dong-long WU (CA)
Total Floor Area: 3144 m2
Project year: 2008-2012
Photographer: Yu-Chen ZAO, Guei-Shiang Ke
Yuwen Library is part of Tainan's ongoing program to expand public reading space across the city. On a compact East District site — bounded on three sides by streets and ringed by an elementary school, a community center, a park, and a boulevard — the building draws these civic neighbors together and turns its life outward through large concrete "windows" at its corners. Conceived as a generator of civic activity, it gives pride of place to the children's library, set directly opposite the school.
The design takes gaze and looking as its organizing idea. A low concrete volume mediates between the public spaces outside and the functions within, its openings framed by concrete panels and canopies at the building's most charged points: the corner facing the school (children's library), the face toward the community center (young-adult area), a window onto the park (reading room), and a glazed band along the boulevard (lobby). These symbolic apertures invite the public's gaze across the library's edges from every side.
Half-embedded in the concrete base sits an upper volume clad in vertical wood louvers — a metaphor for books, shaped by four carved-in curves into a distinct, iconographic form. Within, louvers and broad glazing flood the space with diffused light, and the impulse to look gives way to the quiet act of reading.
