Beam me up to the Wormhole Library
The port city of Haikou, the capital of China’s southernmost island province, Hainan, is undergoing a renaissance.
In early 2021, cultural authorities established plans for 16 seaside pavilions along the city’s coastline. Each sector was given over to an artist, architect or designer tasked with crafting a new landmark. This monumental squad includes such luminaries as Sou Fujimoto, Bjarke Ingels, Anish Kapoor and Kengo Kuma.
The assignment was wide open, says Ma Yansong, founder of MAD Architects and one of the commissioned designers. The design brief called for a few straightforward amenities, such as restrooms; otherwise, it was up to the designers.
After considering a few sites, Ma’s team settled on building a library in Haikou’s Century Park. There, the architects opened a portal to another dimension.
The Cloudscape of Haikou
— the first of the port pavilions to be completed, in 2021 — is an otherworldly exercise in technology and sculpture. To say the project embraces curvilinear design almost minimises what the architects accomplished. The project hides its structure, supports and mechanical systems so completely that it looks fluid. The pavilion’s seamless shape, defined by its openings, resembles a vessel that descended from space. Which might explain why the building has come to be known as the Wormhole Library.
The architect says his goal with the project was to transport library users from Haikou, which offers picture-perfect views of the strait that connects Beibu Gulf with the South China Sea. “When people go to a cultural space, they’re expecting a journey,” Ma says.
VERY DIFFERENT
On the one hand, Ma describes the building, looking outward, as a “camera”: the Wormhole Library provides views of the same sea that people can find anywhere in Haikou, yet in a context that is “out of reality, very different from normal life”.
On the other hand, looking inward, the building is wholly abstract. The architect says that he wanted to rid the interior of any visual elements that might compete with a book for a reader’s attention. Doors, edges, right angles — all potentially too distracting for a reader looking to step through a portal into a world of imagination.
“People will read those elements,” Ma says. “They will try to find out what’s the meaning of those materials.”
The building’s low-slung frame gives it a cosy yet futuristic appearance: think hobbit-hole, but in space. (It’s worth noting that MAD also penned the similarly sci-fi design of the Lucas Museum under construction in
Los Angeles.)
That theme continues inside, where curving walls and windows create both bright rooms and dim nooks for different reading experiences.
The centre of the library is a two-storey reading room with 10,000 titles. Viewed from afar, the whole building reads like a sculpture, a public-art centrepiece for the park.
For the library’s abstract flow from floor to wall to ceiling, MAD Architects used software tools associated with algorithmic design. These parametric tools allow architects to build with curving lines and surfaces (sometimes called “blobs” in graphic design).
PARAMETRIC TOOLS
While the use of algorithms in modern architecture goes back as far as Antoni Gaudí, who attached weights to hanging chains to model the shapes of his arches in the late 19th century, architects working from the late 1980s to mid1990s came up with the practices known (controversially) as parametricism.
But the design for the Wormhole Library didn’t start on a computer.
The architects built a physical model for the library first, then figured out how to model it using software, Ma says. MAD used these parametric tools to design the mould (known as formwork) for casting the building in concrete.
Then the architects turned to a computer numerical control (CNC) laser cutter to precisely manufacture the formwork. Every curve had to be precise for the building to come together, since any wrong measurements or defects in the casting would show up in the concrete. Measure asymptotically, cut once — that could be the MAD mantra for the Wormhole Library.
Despite the sophisticated tech used to build a sculpture that conjures images of mindbending warps in the fabric of spacetime, Ma describes his process as traditional.
“Start from this sketch, then start on the models, then imagine the space inside while at the same time defining different functions in the building,” Ma says.
“It’s not computer-generated design, but computer-assisted production of a very artistic building.”