May 4, 2015

Oakland-based arts collective designs an innovative pop-up library for the Bay Area Book Festival

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The Bay Area Book Festival is a new literary festival that will take place in Berkeley on the weekend of June 6th and 7th. The organizers received a donation of 50,000 books from the Internet Archive to give away at the festival, and so they decided to collaborate with the Flux Foundation, an Oakland-based artist collective who have designed large scale installations for festivals like Burning Man and Coachella.

The design involves twelve alcoves that form a circle, and each alcove is made from pillars of books with wooden shelves. The alcoves are connected with wire that create a tent in the middle. A post on Shareable says the design is “inspired by nomadic structures of Central Asia and formal civic buildings like Rome’s Pantheon.” In a video, the Bay Area Book Festival organizers describe the particular feeling they want Lacuna to evoke for festival attendees:

Sometimes when you’re reading and you glance up from the world in the pages, you see the outside world in a new way. Lacuna is a physical representation of that moment.

The Bay Area Book Festival has launched a Kickstarter campaign to make the design a reality, and they’ve already surpassed their $10,000 goal.

 

Claire Kelley is the Director of Library and Academic Marketing at Melville House.

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