Archives Library
Yale Graduate Studio
INSTRUCTOR Joel Sanders
SITE Corner of Trumbull Street and Hillhouse Ave, New Haven, CT
PROGRAM Extension of Bieneke Library’s current facility, vault, archivist process spaces, offices, reading room, group meeting, classrooms, theater
To express the circulation and processing of visual materials, circulation routes are exposed to allow visitors to selectively navigate through these normally off-limit zones. The proposal also incorporates a connection to the Farmington canal greenway, facilitating a connection to temple street and sponsoring a new bike path to the center of the green. In massing, I used two rows of compact storage modules and a central access path stacking these to the six stories to continue the urban edge. Inserting a loading dock along the back edge to sponsor a processing/admin bar to frame a front lawn and respecting the suburban scale. The entry sequence for the public first involves the underground digital interface, a basement level connection with digital display screening the digital storage modules behind. The tunnel and street level paths parallel the processing facilities to the right and converge at the lobby, lodged in plain view of the loading dock. From this point, event and researcher paths break encountering a myriad of connections to the material of the archive and between users.
