This airy pavilion celebrates the power of the printed word by using books as its building blocks. Set to debut at Berkeley's first Bay Area Book Festival in June, Lacuna is both a large-scale public art installation and a “library” of free books that visitors can take home and keep. Renderings of the unique structure show it's comprised of 12 pillars made of stacked books. Connected to the pillars are the supporting walls, which are formed with two-sided bookshelves. The canopy-like roof, which shades a reading area within the pavilion, is thatched with hundreds of book pages that flutter in the breeze.
Plans for the book pavilion were drawn up by the Flux Foundation, a nonprofit design firm that specializes in large-scale public art projects. Currently, festival organizers are collecting money through a Kickstarter online fundraising page to turn the designs into a reality.
The books that will fill Lacuna‘s shelves have already been donated by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that publishes public domain materials on its website. The organization has already digitized the content in the hard-copy books, so now they're ready to be redistributed into new homes. “Lacuna is a temple to the physical weight of books, the space they occupy, and the power of knowledge that is contained within their covers,” the designers say on their site.
Lacuna project website
Lacuna Kickstarter page
via [Laughing Squid]
