Info︎

Library of Dreams

Lower East Side, New York
Spring 2019, Columbia GSAPP

Critic: Christoph Kumpusch, Forward Slash

Humans spend about one third of their life in an unconscious state - with our minds still active throughout. No matter who we are, we all sleep - and we all dream. The nature of the unconscious is a storehouse of repressed memories specific to the individual and our ancestral past. This past, immortalized in our collective unconscious, is shared with other members of the human species, permeating race, age, gender, and culture. Scientists are still inconclusive on the cause and significance of dreams, leaving a lot of effort dedicated to studying the recording of dreams: a new media and knowledge to collect and share.

Since the nineteenth century, the Lower East Side has developed a rich history as the center of New York City immigrant life and cultural diversity. The neighborhood retains parts of that heritage today, with over half of the population speaking a non-English language. As a public institution within this context, it is imperative for the library to form common ground and accommodate populations with varying levels of literacy in a multitude of languages. Studies show that sharing dreams, a mutual media and vocabulary, promotes the ability to project empathy or sympathy, a matter of increased importance in today’s political climate.

The internet and media circulating in the libraries of today has transformed the world into an infinite and rapidly moving roll of images. Computer monitors and smartphone screens display information from the environment around us, but as a projection from the inside - blurring the boundary between what is real and what is a projection. A dream can be thought of in the same way, a fantasy version of our outside environment projected from the inside.

The Library of Dreams is a physical space that embodies the moment when one recognizes that they are dreaming, in a moment of self-realization and discovery, and are faced with the choice to wake up or continue on further into the blurred consciousness.