Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Urban Open-Air Mobile Library

In A new chapter for urban readers, today's Boston Globe highlights a cool new idea from the creators of the former Storefront Library in Chinatown: The Uni: a portable, open-air reading room for public space. Not your parents' bookmobile,
"the Uni is a new type of small-scale, portable institution that puts books and learning experiences such as readings, classes, and screenings where we don't regularly see them in the city. It can be installed in various configurations at different scales, and it can thrive in a variety of locations, efficiently transforming areas within parks, plazas, or empty lots into places of community use, learning, and public engagement." 
"The Uni starts with a custom-designed infrastructure that can be adapted to almost any kind of urban space. It consists of 144 open-faced cubes, which can be stacked and locked together in different configurations or heights, depending on site conditions. Together these cubes provide a modular system for programming public space and creating a venue for books, workshops, arts-and-crafts, demonstrations, classes, lectures, public meetings, and small film screenings."
Pictures at the project's site are very exciting. We only wish they were doing it here!