The new technologies of today must be integrated with an idea that incorporates the memory of the past not as nostalgia, but as living in the present. This heterogeneous condition is known as singularity, which as a process differs from individual expression in that it involves the possibility of repetition. But unlike standardization, which is a self-same mechanical repetition, singularity involves the possibility of self-similar repetition which contains an already given difference. In architecture, this difference can be described as follows. In order to preserve the singularity of objects, one must cut them off from their previous modes of legitimization, which in architecture means cutting the object off from its legitimization in function, i.e. that form follows function, or that architecture will always embody meaning. This does not mean that architecture will not function or mean but rather that it will no longer be legitimated by these conditions. This is what is meant by the already given difference of singularity.
Singularity in an object requires the denial of the traditional dialectic between figure and ground. In place of this dialectic, it is possible to conceive of a figure-figure relationship, where the ground no longer frames the object, but rather becomes part of the object itself. In order to produce a singular object there must also be a new process that is no longer legitimized by function and form. This process is similar to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call the machinic, which they describe as neither the mechanical nor the organic, another dialectic which formerly described all metaphysical processes. The machinic is neither a closed process, nor a process of personal expression. Rather it stands between these two, as a process outside of authorial control which can produce, from seemingly arbitrary and value-free origins, results that contain both a memory of its process and the form of an object that could not have been predicted a priori. Our project for the Geneva library is a result of such thinking.
Following the site plan proposed by Massimiliano Fuksas, our project is the only object building that is required on the site. Because of its siting, it is required to have two fronts, one facing the United Nations on the Avenue de la Paix, and one to the south facing the Rue de Fernet. Equally important is that the building must allow for the continuation of the east-west pedestrian walk that passes on the north side of the site. Our process incorporates each of these different requirements into an object that grows in a machinic manner, rather than mechanically or organically, out of the site. The Place des Nations is located at an intersection of two types of urbanism, one in which a landscape of parks defines the spaces, and another in which these spaces are defined by "objects." Our project operates between the landscape and the object, blurring both conditions into one heterogeneous space. The library structure then acts as a hinge between the formal Place des Nations and the surrounding parks, revealing in its being the "disappearance of the object."
The program was developed by the librarian of the Bibliothèque de L'IHUEI, who states that the library should be envisioned as a functional prism (or, in our case, as a series of prisms), a combination of services capable of simultaneously answering multiple tasks, producing a relay of knowledge capable of expressing the acquisitions of the past into a new representation of knowledge with inferences from artificial intelligence.
The late twentieth-century has witnessed the growing awareness of virtual space, space which has always been repressed within actual space by the constraints of form-making. The tradition of architecture has based itself for the last four hundred years on the making of form. This priority gave a value to forming, while space was seen as a residue. Our library considers space as the initiating condition, and produces from this a series of spaces which can be called interstitial, space which is neither the product of a framing ground nor formed from the generation of a pre-existent figure. Rather the interstitial is a between condition, between figure and ground, between form and space. It is a result of a process of spacing which involves the transformation and recording of vectors, energy flows which have a mass, a density, and an energy.