On design lessons from the City I

I attended Tay Kheng Soon's lecture at the National Library today. The lecture venue was on the first floor of the library adjacent to a busy pedestrian walkway. Just as Kheng Soon was about to start lecturing, it dawned on me that there were three separate design elements (or should I say opportunities?) in this room that are associated but were however, likely missed in their unison during the design process.

The first is the choice of presentation, or pedagogical device, or lecturing vehicle. From the photo, we can see that the designer has selected to make the projector the main lecturing technology and the screen the visual medium. However with this choice must come a second design element: a set of opaque screens that lined the glass fenestration which not only cuts out the glare from outside but by their sheer blackness, renders the lighting conditions in the room more conducive for projector-based presentations.

But the paramount design opportunity comes with the third design element, which is the deliberate intent to position a lecture room at the public edge of the National Library. However, this intent has been fully nullified by the decisive force of the former two design elements!

Granted, members of the public were informed to attend this public lecture. But informed attendance is not the same as chanced attendance, which is what makes city life more serendipitous and yes, more public, than rural life. Because the lecture room is strategically positioned along a busy urban edge right in the middle of the city, surely the design intention must be to draw the inner lives of a public library closer to the civic lives of the city! However during the lecture, countless silhouettes walked past, oblivious to an important lecture held within concerning the future publics in Singapore. In other words, in making this room an optimal environment internally for public discourse, this room has to be severed from the larger discourse that can only occur through a spontaneous interaction with the external room of the city.

Three innocently made design decisions, apparently independent on the surface, however congealed structurally to form a final and perhaps permanent design condition which not only nullifies the potential of the public through design, but ultimately, also contradicted the public mission of the National Library because of design.