A NEW ANALOG
Refooting the city of Portland, Maine back at the source of it’s origins, a new library and archive will consolidate the widely decentralized materials and textual documents supporting the collective education of its patrons. The library collection reflects the core of the city - both historical and modern- a dense whole pressurized and morphed into a social space of interaction with both the city and the information that drives its growth.The library will function as both a physical store for the collective archives of the city while reengaging the public frontage from which the city was founded. The Portland Public Library and Archive is dependent on the materiality and uniqueness of the information, not tangible in digitized form. The library provides the critical site of interaction with these materials, inserting the public within an immersive textual and image based whole holding the collective brain and history of the city.
