NUK II

We started like the Romans. Roman cities, spread by the continental territory, adopted this Cartesian logic, that revealed itself as a very plastic and flexible model, allowing them to materialize their social/cultural/political system in each singular place. What started to be an imposing model ended up to result in a very operative way of acting in the territory. The established grid-system (proposed) works, conceptually, at two levels: the relation with the Roman City ruins and the spatial layout configuration of the given Programme. We recovered the Cardus and Decumanus directions, bringing them into the spatial structure of the entire Library. The ambiguous situation of the limit between street and site (street level about 297.00m and the ruins level at 295.00m) offers a very powerful theme, that articulates several dimensions of the building in a single gesture: - opening the Historical territorial mark of city's birth to the eyes of everyone, assuming a permanent presence of the Roman remains in the daily life of Ljubljana; - detaching the Entrance Hall level to a higher height, with a privileged view upon the Zoizova cesta ('University Avenue); this raising of the Programme gave us the opportunity to work the several entrances with specific and well-hierarchical devices, achieving the Competition requirements; - the block crossing path between Rimska Street and Zoizova Street SW corner is made in a peaceful and autonomous way. It profits from a specific height that allows some punctual perspectives to some of the interior spaces and to the Roman remains; - the exterior/interior passages are, therefore, very rich in terms of relations between the city and the library, spatially and functionally speaking, without neglecting the security and control matters; - by constituting this layered composition (see figure...), this also builds a punctuated path, starting from the city (flow, movement, gathering, noise) and ending in the library space, more controlled in terms of access, use, light, visual relations and, specially, silence.