The research of the project: “Library in the town of Trikala near the river of Letheos – Knowledge and Lethe” the search was based on two starting –points:
1. the construction of a library which, being a social need, will fulfill the requirements set by the contemporary times and the town itself, and
2. the conditions under which the new activity is placed among this particular area of urban tissue and the town in general, taking the place of the prison building (which is transferred out of city) and “discussing” with the river of Letheos.
Each starting –point includes the speculation of how, on the one hand, a new –in style and framework –social activity and on the other hand a building form, may affect balance, create new circumstances and have the possibility to put into shape the public space that it’ s placed into (semi –urban zone situated by the river).
The choice of the place by the river (in the Saint Constantine’s park where there are located the scheduled building of the mosque, the prison of the town, the church of Saint Constantine and a school) and in proximity from the center of the town, reveals first of all the spirit for the creation of a new pole in the urban tissue, on town planning level and to restore the park, which looses its dynamic because of the prison’s existence.
The concept that led to this designing is based on a personal explanation of the dipolar Knowledge –Lethe, as well as to the rendering of the library as a useful public element. Actually, a library, beyond the freedom that it offers by the process of knowledge, it maybe lends by itself to coercion. This relationship between freedom and coercion was tried to be translated synthetically. Two high parallel compact volumes run across the ground. Between
them “runs” a pedestrianized street that follows the volumes and it overruns them, while at 8.00m high the two buildings are intersected by another built volume. The knowledge bores the Ignorance the Freedom is shaped as drilling of another shaped space.
The challenge to meet successfully all these parameters, as well as the desire to “open” this area of urban tissue that is “sealed” today because of the prison’s existence, dictated this proposal, on the one hand for the “outside” plan, the basic points for the lay, out of the public space but especially for the “inside” plan of the building, as a structure with prerequisite uses and also as a shape that interacts with the “outside”.
The building with its shape enters to interplay as the regulator of the new situation. The building does not exist without the environment that it has created and the environment is being formed by the building.