Client: NOTCH Festival 09
Location: China
Concept: Architect David Garcia
Drawings & Production: Marion Spillmann, Lawrence Ebelle, Max Gerthel & Shuyu Chen
Year: 2009
Photo credit; Map Architects

For NOTCH 09, together with Map Architects we worked on the production of two interactive spaces ARCHIVE II and ARCHIVE IV, where information, books and music, become the generating factors for simple spaces full of social potential.
Both works are part of an architectonic research into the character of information storage at a small scale. This Archive Series, exemplifies the unavoidable “weight” of information, whether digital or analogue, and our varied relationships to it. ARCHIVE II and ARCHIVE IV were conceived to be attractions for social gathering and information hubs.

ARCHIVE II, a round wheel book archive, functions as a nomadic library, where the user can travel with his own books. Once still, it creates a room for meeting and inspiration, generating a special acoustic echo for the reader inside the wheel.
ARCHIVE IV challenges space and weight, by hanging from the ceiling. A wooden cylinder, 3 meter in diameter and 3.5 meter high, suspended from above, serves as a sitting area and as an archive for books and music in its inside. The visitor encounters a quiet space for conversation, and in the centre a rope ladder takes the curious to a level above, a micro lounge room, where one can look out into the crowd. From the outside, the introvert character of the structure hides the human body, only revealing feet at floor level, and the heads of visitors that climb to the top.