Beyond the third place

LEARN

The term third place was coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg to refer to the places where people spend time between home (their first place) and work (the second). They are places where people connect with each other, exchange ideas, and build relationships. Traditionally, third places are informal — the churches, parks, diners, and hairdressers where people can easily connect with each other. Sociologists consider libraries to be one of the most important examples of a third place; and as libraries have taken on new roles in their communities, librarians and library administrators are re-envisioning the future of libraries.

In 2015 the Dokk1 library opened in Denmark. It’s been called “the living room of the city,” and includes space for performances, meetings, children’s activities, art, and public gatherings.

A Library From the Future Arrives In Denmark
CityLab, December 20, 2016

It’s hard not feel as if you’ve just visited the library of the future after spending a day at Dokk1.

In a formerly industrial part of Aarhus, egg chairs are now sprinkled around the periphery of the massive new “hybrid library.” There, a three-ton tubular bell called The Gong echoes through every time a child is born at the local hospital. Outside, a ferry to Copenhagen comes and goes from the harbor while kids and adults play across a field with teeter-totters, a tire swing, and a huge slide in the shape of an eagle.

Opened in 2015, Dokk1 is more than Scandinavia’s largest library — it’s a community hub that meets the changing needs of Denmark’s second largest city. Last summer, Dokk1 was named the Public Library of the Year by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). As the notion that libraries simply serve as a home for books dissolves, Dokk1 merges old and new concepts of what a library should be.

Marie Østergård, the library’s project leader who spearheaded the library’s ten-year planning process, says there was no blueprint for the type of library the city government envisioned. The only thing to do was to consult the community. “We knew what we wanted to build wasn’t something we could already describe,” says Østergård. “What you see right now is basically a big puzzle piece that has come together using many different ideas and knowledge from many different arenas,” she adds. “We were perpetually asking, ‘What kind of functions do we want in a future library? What are the city’s needs and where is the world going?’”

The result is less a home for books and more a space for people. “We have this metaphor, that we could take all the bookshelves, put them in the main square of the city, put a roof on the building and then you would have the main library,” says Kim Holst Jensen, senior partner at Schmidt Hammer Lassen, the architects behind Dokk1.

Read the full article here (and click to see more pictures).

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