Harry Potter and the Flaming Wok

The design hive of the Sam Fox school of design and art is an interlocking collection of buildings with numerous studios, auditoriums, workshops, classrooms, and computer labs. However, if you just want a nice place to read or study, you find yourself a bit hard pressed. The coffee shop/snack bar which one would think might have some nice spaces to sit and read while you sip your coffee has the misfortune of being located in Steinberg hall. Japanese Metabolist Fumihiko Maki's first commission, the spaces are cold, angular, pristine white circulation spaces full of light and uncompromising hard planar forms. Even the coffee bar is white. The scattering of a few standing height tables in the corner of the large terrazzo covered space has the feeling of an international airport. It's a very cosmopolitain space, but it is just to transitory for focused study.

The architecture library is the other possibility, and is actually Saori's preferred place of study. There is apparently two chairs along a wall near the stacks that she is fond of. I'm not a huge fan of that library for studying - I don't like sitting and reading in subterranean large spaces. Sitting in the main reading room feels like being in the bottom of a large square white pit. There is daylight provided by large high windows, but the scale makes me feel small, and exposed. There's no wood, no color, and a bare minimum of texture. I like reading spaces to be comfortable, and I'm just not comfortable in those spaces.

Yesterday, I discovered the the East Asian library in January hall, which was the former law school. This is less than a five minute walk from the architecture building, but completely removed in atmosphere and feel. The building was built in 1922, and like other buildings around the campus, is done in collegiate Gothic style. The interior spaces are primerily offices with a large lecture hall at one end, but on the second floor, there is a double height interior space which houses the library. When I found it, the HongKongese librarian aide welcomed me to the "Harry Potter Library." It does bear a resemblance to the dining hall at Hogwarts actually. Bookshelves line the walls with high windows above them along the sides of the hall, rising up to interior wooden buttresses to a gothic arched ceiling. At the end of the library, there is a huge bay window with two easy chairs. It feels like the place hasn't changed much from the 1920, although it looks like there was some addional work done in the 60's-70's. One of the bookcases had a "No Smoking" sign attached to it. Surreally, this gothic space is full of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese books, but there is still that wonderful "old book" smell to it. This is where I like to read.