Lucas Almássy
Fall 2025
The Yuanyang University Library project began during a visit to Yunnan, China. With Zhang Ke, principal and founder of ZAO/Standard Architecture, we stood atop a mountain above the surrounding villages where he pointed out that schools occupied elevated peaks and children from nearby villages climbed to reach them. The project developed a central thesis: education is not only an institutional program, but a spatial and bodily act. The library therefore becomes a constructed landscape of learning, where the ground itself is shaped into a hierarchy of public, collective, and solitary spaces.
The project understands architecture as furniture for a community. Tables, benches, stairs, ledges, terraces, and platforms are treated not as secondary details, but as the primary infrastructure of social and intellectual life. At the highest point, a café recognizes conversation, food, and informal exchange as foundations of learning. Below it, an auditorium descends into a public plaza, while administrative spaces connect directly to civic life. The library is embedded underground, where quiet study rooms receive sunlight through skylights. Rather than producing grandeur by raising the roof, the project lowers and thickens the ground, carving significance out of earth, weight, and section. Developed through continuous modeling rather than clean-slate redesign, the project accumulated through edits, refinements, and intensifications, allowing each stair, seat, threshold, and void to become part of a larger social instrument.
Ultimately, the Yuanyang University Library proposes a model of architectural practice in which community is not produced by program alone, but by the careful formation of ground, furniture, and shared position.