The Welcoming, The 'welcoming' and changing nature of 'service' for Auckland's central city Public Library

Abstract

The Welcoming investigates the nature of welcome and service in the complexity surrounding the role of Auckland’s central city library in relation to its affiliations with the city’s diverse ethnic community. The thesis proposes a new CBD site – currently the Elliot Street Wilson Car park - and a library condition based on an experimental ideology of universal ethnic inclusion. It recognises the way society perceives and behaves towards central libraries is changing in light of technological advancements, but argues these changes can be harnessed to service a welcoming environment for Auckland’s diverse community as one single body The thesis employs three methodological themes: Welcoming, Breaking Boundaries, and Evolving Service. Coherently, these explore the idea of inclusive welcoming through an active mode of precedent research studies, literary analysis, drawings, model making, and the author’s own experience as a member of Auckland’s Muslim community. Welcoming formulates an experimental framework built upon a value system of social justice from the Muslim community and their religion Islam. It is simultaneously explored through the Maori communities’ beliefs and ideologies to test inclusive principles and develop as a design application towards inclusive welcoming. Breaking Boundaries explores place-making beyond the new site’s perimeter using drawings and analysis aiming for urban revitalisation and connectivity, especially to the adjacent city rail link station. Evolving Service is explored through precedent studies, drawings, and the collective embodiment of both Welcoming and Breaking Boundaries processes to develop new programmatic arrangements and assemblages to provide essential services that welcome and enable societies’ opportunity for equal progression. The resulting proposal exploits connectivity beyond the new CBD site’s borders, expanding the library’s everyday use. Its condition explores the possibility of designing a social infrastructure via a value base framework of religious teachings of social justice under the thematic headings; Guardianship, Hospitality, Co-existence, and Sacred. The Architecture of social justice and welcoming highlights government obligation for the people and the result of a more united, prosperous, and educated society. The public library proposed an experimental output to test the value-based framework as a translation of design. This should be considered a conceptual exploration. It does not provide a ‘right’ answer towards the central library’s construction. However, it showcases a method through which the public library can become universally welcoming inclusively to all diverse communities of Auckland city. Architecturalising this also expresses how the library condition may improve and better connect different communities through similarities rather than the differences often found by people. Consequently, the result of this could forever shift a long engraved stigma related to public libraries and their purpose in our evolving cities. A balance of technological and physical programmatic assemblages provide the substantial opportunity and functions that enable equal access of knowledge and integration of all ethnicities of Auckland’s cosmopolitan society.