B7_#075 // The Library // Quentin Dauvergne 

The ideal library celebrates books’ ability to enable a mental escape through a physical object. 

Developing this idea, the library uses the same opening gesture to access the spatial incarnation of this momentary retreat from the world. 

Although individual, this space is furnished by the conversation between oneself and the story being unfolded, opening a view on faraway lands. A psychiatrist daybed lying next to a window. 

Just as books’ meaning are hidden within their words, deciphered through language,  the library’s mechanism is hidden from sight, in the joints of a forced perspective door, ultimately resulting in the unexpected Arnolfini’s divorce. 

The painting contains multiple elements suggesting the existence of a world outside its frame and plane. It thus becomes the sign of the library’s take on its own true function, of which it remains the cipher, the symbol.

Quentin Dauvergne is a Diploma Student at the Architectural Association