Library As Workshop

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This is an interactive collage. Take the letters, put them in the holes, and build a sentence.

I asked my class to take two or three words each, and build the sentence, thus creating a collective active learning experience of these words of Ibn Jama'a. Its part of our preliminary conceptual research before we begin to design a library.

"The thirteenth-century scholar Ibn Jama'a, although recommending that students purchase books whenever possible, thought it most important that they be "carried in the heart" and not merely kept on a shelf. Copying out texts helped one commit them to memory, thereby building (he thought) a sort of parallel library to the one of ink and paper...According to Ibn Jama'a, the art of memory was akin to that of architecture, since by practicing it a reader could build to his taste a private palace furnished with collected treasures, declaring ownership of the texts he had chosen in a deep and definitive way."

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel