Leah Altman
P006 → Compositing TGB
Course: 200C, Representational Practices, Fall 2023
Instructor: Matthew Kendall
2024 Winner of Bakewell, Brown, and Weihe Prize: award offered for the best drawings of decorative detail or ornament in architecture
The Très Grande Bibliothèque (TGB) was a proposal for the national French library submitted by Rem Koolhaas + OMA in 1989.
TGB is an inversion of the expected behavior of a building. The absence created by voids is what defines the most important and most focused on aspects of the design. This design was imagined as a solid block of information (a dense repository for the past) from which voids are carved to create public spaces (absence floating in memory).
Imagine a building consisting of regular and irregular spaces, where the most important parts of the building consist of an absence of building.
Given this building as a precedent, I was tasked with representing it through plans, sections, and a rendered composite (shown above).
My wish through this project was to give vibrancy and character to the intent of TGB while also drawing in my own graphic style. The colors were chosen based off of original documentation and images produced of the project by OMA.
Images produced using Rhino, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Vray.